Dead Meat

One of the most talked about writers in England today, chosen by the literary magazine Granta as one of the "Best of Young British Novelists" for the 1990s, Philip Kerr in his fifth novel explores the twilight landscape of St. Petersburg and the haunted, driven souls who inhabit it.
In contemporary Russia the only paint is green, toilet paper costs a week's pension, and dead lightbulbs are a precious commodity. This is the world inhabited by a nameless, cuckolded Moscow investigator, a lawyer by training, who is sent to St. Petersburg to seek out possible corruption in the Central Investigating Board.
The man from Moscow finds himself teamed up with a gruff, seemingly honest inspector named Grushko in the investigation of the murder of a famous journalist. To the St. Petersburg cops, and in particular the single-minded Grushko, the crime is obviously the work of the Russian Mafia, a combative and bloodthirsty league of Georgian, Azerbaijani, Ukrainian, and Chechen criminals who deal in everything from fake Rolexes to stolen meat. ("We'll never defeat the Mafia," one policeman says. "It's the one thing in this country that actually works.")
Then hoodlums suddenly start dying and Grushko and his shadow from Moscow must surmount their own doubts about each other to solve a crime that goes well beyond Milyukin's murder.
Set against the sad, beautiful backdrop of a once grand city now populated by an extraordinary cast of cops, hard-currency whores, materialistic yuppies, pimps, and "made men," Dead Meat is a superb, hard-edged suspense thriller. And with its echoes of Dostoyevsky, it is also an unforgettable literary journey through the strange and blood-soaked landscape where everyone is guilty of something, and punishment comes in many forms.

Kerr's most recent novel, A Philosophical Investigation , takes place in England in the near future, while his three-volume Bernhard Gunther series, begun with March Violets , is set in 1930s Berlin. Here he turns to modern-day Russia to trace an electrifying battle between the anemically funded Russian police and well-heeled ethnic Mafiosi who operate at will in post-Soviet St. Petersburg. An anonymous narrator--an Internal Affairs-type lawyer--monitors detective Yevgeni Ivanovich Grushko's efforts to nail mob thugs for the murder of an investigative journalist who had aired Mafia laundry and government scandal on TV. Grushko rousts the Ukrainian and Chechen mobsters, who rival the Georgians in the proliferation of scams, protection rackets and black-market action marking Russia's emerging private-sector economy. Struggling to investigate amid such impediments as red tape, public distrust of police, KGB rivalry, low police morale and minimal resources, Grushko even appeals for leads on a Geraldo Rivera-like show. While the detective inches toward a resolution connecting the Chernobyl disaster, the mob and a British-backed Russian capitalist venture, the narrator falls for the journalist's sexy widow and learns hard lessons from Grushko about fighting for justice in an unhinged society. In Kerr's literate dark novel, strains of romantic balalaika music blend with the sound of the sharp wind sweeping across the steppes. Readers will hope for more appearances of this new man from Moscow.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kerr's nameless narrator, a Moscow police investigator sent to St. Petersburg to observe the local force's tactics in handling the Mafia, gets a closer look than he expected when, hours after his arrival, noted investigative reporter Mikhail Milyukin, long a Mafia foe, is gunned down along with petty Georgian criminal Vaja Ordzhonikidze. Attached to senior detective Yevgeni Ivanovich Grushko, the narrator soon finds that well-hated Milyukin had so many enemies that the queue of possible suspects--gang leaders, dope dealers, smugglers, pimps, outraged newspaper readers--is endless, especially since everybody from Milyukin's widow to the narrator is hiding secrets of their own. But Grushko alertly links the killings to the casual firebombing of the Pushkin Restaurant to come up with a motive even nastier. Not to be compared with Gorky Park, or with Kerr's own peerless Berlin chronicles of Bernie Gunther (A German Requiem, 1991, etc.)--but still a sharp, sour look at a post-Soviet world in which everything and everybody is up for grabs. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Mikhail Milyukin, Russia's first investigative journalist, is found executed Mafia-style. Finding his killers and the reason for the murder falls to relentless militia officer Yevgeni Grushko. This novel works both as a gritty cop novel in a unique setting and as a lens on a troubled and tragic country. Kerr really did his homework; he secured the cooperation of the St. Petersburg militia's organized crime unit, rode with its officers, and took part in several operations against the Mafia. His research gives the book special weight, for example, in his explanations of the ethnic foundations of Russia's gangs. The language of cops and thugs alike has a wonderfully quirky but authentic sound; strikes against the Mafia are "realisations." Equally important, however, Kerr lived with the incredible privations that nearly all Russians endure. His illumination of those hardships in the lives of his characters is almost painful at times, and the startling crime uncovered by Grushko has a terrible plausibility in grim contemporary Russia. Thomas Gaughan