From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Set in December 2008, Nadelson's ninth mystery featuring Russian émigré and NYPD detective Artie Cohen (after 2009's Londongrad) shows her at the top of her game. Cohen is roused in the middle of the night by a call from a former girlfriend, journalist Lily Hanes, who asks for his help dealing with a dead neighbor, Marianna Simonova. Despite Hanes's claim that Simonova died of natural causes in her Harlem apartment, Cohen suspects Hanes isn't telling him everything. When his digging reveals that another elderly resident of Simonova's building died unexpectedly about six months earlier, he wonders whether a desire to spare the seriously ill suffering was behind both deaths. Alternatively, the tenants may have been in the way of an ambitious developer's plans to upgrade the building. Nadelson has few peers at incorporating a strong whodunit plot into a contemporary police inquiry, but her real strength is Cohen himself, a tortured but sympathetic soul whose close relationships are never straightforward.
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Typically, Nadelson’s series hero, Russian immigrant and NYPD detective Artie Cohen, careens around the city at breakneck pace or, as in Londongrad (2009), jets across the ocean, often to Russia, in search of answers to whatever case is bedeviling him. Cohen is bedeviled this time, too, but there is very little movement. The action takes place almost entirely within the walls of a Harlem apartment building, where Cohen’s former girlfriend, Lily, now lives and where her Russian neighbor, Marianna, has died under suspicious circumstances. Fearing that she might be implicated in the death, Lily calls Artie for help. What he finds in the building is a cross section of the new Harlem—young professionals living alongside older, affluent African Americans, all with agendas about the future of the building. Backstories bring together the concerns of the younger residents with a world Artie knows well—that of Russian immigrants, also on the make, with many conflicted over the ideals of new and old Russia, as the black characters are over new and old Harlem. Although not as action-oriented as earlier installments in the series, Nadelson’s latest offers a fascinating look at culture change in New York’s melting pot. --Bill Ott
