Helen is taking a holiday in Russia with her mother,
desperately trying to get some space from her disastrous break up and collapse
of her career. She never expected to find a place so alien to her – and she
certainly never expected to find the rich and intriguing Alexey
But Alexey has more on his mind than romance – his father
and father’s 2 business partners have all been murdered within a short space of
time. People are whispering about a curse – and not only is the murderer still
uncaught, but other forces have their eyes on his father’s business, looking to
wrest it from his inexperienced and idealistic hands.
The first thing that struck me about this book was the
amount of research that has gone into it. From my unfamiliar eye, this author
seems to have made the effort to ensure the Russia of the book wasn’t just a
Russia of bad stereotypes and alien culture – there has been some work into
making this real and authentic. I can’t say how good a job has been achieved
since I am neither Russian nor especially experience in all things Russian, but
I can feel the effort behind it.
I just feel it’s a shame that so little has been done
with it.
I don’t understand why Helen is the protagonist. In fact,
take a step back, I don’t understand why Helen is in the book at all. All the
action, all the story twists, all the mystery and the investigation and
everything else? It doesn’t involve her. It cannot involve her. It’s all
completely beyond her experience, affecting people she’s only just met and
investigating/resolving it requires knowledge she doesn’t have, skills she
doesn’t have and working with/speaking to a lot of people she’s only just met,
most of which she doesn’t even share a common language with.
Rather reasonably, because of that, she doesn’t actually
do anything. And it is reasonable – even her few interjections about whether
Alexey can trust someone or not (for example) come across as ridiculous because
she is so outside of her experiences, her skills or her specialities that her
intervening would be ludicrous. She doesn’t. She can’t. She spends the vast
majority of this book just following Alexey around and occasionally taking
little breaks to work on the romance (I’d say “develop” the romance but that
would be a stunningly generous description of what happened). Honestly, she
could be entirely removed from the book and very little of real value would
change.
So let’s get to that romance – firstly, it also adds very
little to the plot. It’s an odd tool used to pull Helen (and, therefore, the
protagonist) into the story as audience without having to come up with an
actual reason for her to be there. Helen and Alexey meet (he nearly runs her
over), they arrange a second meeting. Boom. LOVE FOREVER, Alexey (a man receiving
death threats) is now happy to have Helen follow him around everywhere, be
party to all of his company’s secrets and generally be with him every second of
the day when business doesn’t drag him away (and she is free to roam around his
work place/home as you would any near stranger). The romance is tooth-achingly
saccharine and quite dated - Helen actually uses the words “Oh, Alexey”. She
says this more than once; I started picturing everyone in black and white after
that. It’s also comically speeded up with Helen happily considering moving to
Russia and spending the rest of her life there after… a week? Less?
I also don’t even think this book fits our actual genre –
Urban Fantasy (or even speculative fiction at all). I am unsure as to whether
there are any actual supernatural elements in this book – there’s a lot of talk
about psychics and psychic ability and lots of people who believe in psychics
and psychic ability and even people who act based on that belief. But actual
psychic ability? Frankly, it could be all read as a commentary on how
superstitious these people in particular are (or possibly even a commentary on
how superstitious many Russians are) more than actual psychics with actual
preternatural abilities. Whether they actually have the powers they claim is in
doubt and, more tellingly, completely irrelevant. Honestly, it doesn’t matter
as far as the plot, relevant world building or anything else is concerned
whether all the psychics are real, charlatans, superstitious, gullible or just highly
imaginative. Which means if there is a supernatural element to this book, it is
such a tiny side issue as to be irrelevant.
That makes me a little irritated. If I had requested this
book from a publisher/author/agent or picked it up myself I would have been
kicking myself afterwards for having read the blurb wrong or somehow
misunderstood the book’s contents. But I didn’t pick out this book – this was
sent to me by the marketing department of the author’s publisher who should
really know the content of the book they’re publishing.
The supernatural – or people’s belief in the supernatural
– serves two purposes. Firstly, it allows Alexey to decide “I trust this person
because of good instincts” and just bring complete strangers – like Helen and
Maxim – into positions of highly sensitive trust without actually having to
build any story reasons behind it. This doesn’t feel like a story element so
much as a story excuse, a clumsy deus ex machinae to get the characters in line
without actually having to do any real work to get them in place. Secondly,
it’s there for Maxim’s great big teasing red herring as he spends half the book
following up leads among alleged psychics that don’t actually go anywhere
Which brings me to a final frustrating element with the
whole mystery/conspiracy of this book: when we finally get the answer(s) it
turns out to be pretty much unrelated to everything they’ve been
researching/investigating. I understand a good mystery needs a red herring or
two – but just about everything the characters did/found/researched was a dead
end/red herring up to an ending which seemed to have been hurriedly pasted on
from a whole other story.
Inclusionwise we have one minor central Asian character
who briefly appears for a few pages – and that’s about it. No LGBT characters,
no disabled characters and the female protagonist is pretty lacking in any real
capacity.
If you like grand conspiracy dramas, industrial espionage
stories and murder mysteries more than Urban Fantasy then maybe this book won’t
be bad for you. Though even then I can’t really say it would be one I’d
recommend. The protagonist is just to surplus to requirements and frustrating
(though, given the way the book ends and the fact this is the first of a series
I dare say she will become more integral) and the plot to tangential to the
actual result for me to say it would be an ideal choice
