Last Rights: A Novel

A post-Communist thriller features a Russian exile whose parents are separated by the Iron Curtain and who, one day, finds his mother missing and a Russian spy dead in the car

Born in England to Russian parents, Edward Bell's Russian heritage ensnares him in a web of compromise, deceit and danger in this thoughtful and well-crafted thriller about post-Cold War realities and Cold War secrets. The secrets are files detailing potentially explosive agreements between Communist Russia and the governments of the West, stolen during the aborted anti-Gorbachev coup. The thief winds up dead in a car in front of Bell's mother's house--and his mother winds up missing. As Bell tracks both mother and files to Russia, he finds that he is the pawn in a game of face-saving intrigue in which the British, the Americans and the Russians are all after the files, and nobody in Bell's life is what he or she seems to be. The plotting is intricate but never confusing, with satisfying surprises leading to an ending that is all too real; and the likable Bell deepens and darkens as he reveals more about himself. A BBC reporter whose stories about the new Russia got him deported as a suspected British agent, Sebastian ( Saviour's Gate ) weaves gloomy meditations on the aftereffects of the Second Russian Revolution into this dark, despairing story about secrecy and deceit that indicts all governments equally.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The new world order as family romance--this starring a Russian ‚migr‚'s son who struggles to honor both of his parents while keeping a step ahead of the double agents on his trail. Deep in the Moscow vaults, a faceless bureaucrat rifles through the records of a crumbling empire and abstracts The Papers that will bring governments on both sides of the cold war crashing down--then takes off for London, where his plans to sell them are cut off by his death outside the home of the vanished Yekaterina Bell, whose son Edward promptly goes in search of her--and, he hopes, his father, a mathematician who long ago disappeared back inside the USSR and was reported dead. ``Russians, Americans, British--they all wanted a chat with Mother, and therefore a chat with me too,'' says Bell, who's suddenly getting a lot more attention than he'd like. Routine cloak- and-dagger stuff so far; but Bell looking for his parents (in Paris, Berlin, and inevitably Moscow) is like Achilles chasing the tortoise: the closer he gets, the more they seem to recede from him in a welter of flashbacks. We see Bell years past picking up rumors that his father is still alive; Bell reminiscing about contacts and go-betweens who keep turning up dead; Bell getting recruited during a student trip to Russia by his treacherous teacher/lover Irina Semyonova, who gives him a painful glimpse of his cancer-stricken father and whispers about the drug therapy his cooperation can buy. In the end, thanks to an unsurprising final revelation, Bell will have to choose between his two parents and live with the consequences of the quest he'd been so eager to undertake. As densely, dourly textured as Saviour's Gate (1991) and The Memory Church (1992)--the gloomiest possible view of the ``rapprochement'' between East and West. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Sebastian, a former BBC Moscow correspondent and author of Saviour's Gate ( LJ 5/15/91) and The Memory Church ( LJ 12/92), has produced a tightly written, literate, and suspenseful thriller played out against the background of a post-Cold War "new" Russia. The son of Russian emigres--although his scientist father has been back in the homeland for years--Edward Bell is an independent entrepreneur acting as an agent for companies trying to gain entry into Eastern Bloc country trade markets. He comes home one day to find his mother missing and a man dead in her car. As Bell attempts to locate his mother, he is caught in a tug-of-war between rival intelligence agencies. Bell's mother is a key player; unbeknownst to him, she was a Soviet mole in England, and she now possesses stolen KGB archival material. Bell pursues his mother across Europe and the Eastern Bloc countries to save her life and discover the secret of what happened to his father. Played out against current headlines and written with an understanding of the anarchistic conditions now present in Russia, the novel also reveals the intricate relationship that exists between Bell and his mother. Highly recommended for popular fiction collections.
- Erna Chamberlain, SUNY-Binghamton
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Londoner Edward Bell is Russian by birth. His father, a renowned scientist, sought asylum in Britain but fled back to Moscow when homesickness overcame his loyalty to his wife and son. Edward was raised by his mother in a London rowhouse where mysterious strangers often visited, drinking and reminiscing far into the night. Now grown, Edward returns home one day to find a dead Russian spy in his mother's car and his mother missing. Panicked, Edward sets out on a lonely journey to find his mother--a journey that takes him not only into the heart of the new Russia, where disillusionment is a way of life, but also into the heart of his own puzzling past. Sebastian knows the former Soviet Union well enough to provide plenty of credible background details, and in places, he writes as creatively and cryptically as le Carr{‚}e. But despite occasional promising flashes, the story never quite lives up to its potential, thanks to uneven pacing, characters that don't quite click, and Sebastian's somewhat irritating tendency to keep his reader in the dark far too long. Still, it's an entertaining diversion, and spy fans will doubtless enjoy it. Emily Melton