From Publishers Weekly
Red Mercury Blues and Hot Poppies, Nadelson's first two books about Russian-born New York cop Artie Cohen were colorful but basically conventional mysteries. In her third book, the author makes a major leap forward in scope and depth. The novel--a harrowing take on the sickness that seeped out of Russia following the collapse of communism and infected New York and London--offers a frightening, apocalyptic vision of two cities drowning in success. Characters we've met before have grown and changed: Artie, still carrying several loads of immigrant baggage from his journey to Moscow to Israel to New York, is no longer a cop but a PI, doing special jobs for a much-subdued Sonny Lippert, his mentor, who's a federal prosecutor. Artie's lover, Lily Haines, now the mother of an adopted Chinese baby girl, is worried that Artie's current case--looking into a Russian connection to the murder of a wealthy and powerful Englishman who ruled his exclusive Sutton Place co-op with a ruthless hand--might stir up some old secrets of her own, especially about her ex-husband, who has a found a way to profit from the homeless. And Tolya Sverdloff, Cohen's charming and conniving friend from the streets of Moscow and Brighton Beach, is now a high-flying player in some brutal financial games, worried enough to have a secret steel-walled safe room carved into his apartment. The scenes set in New York City are taut and sharply etched, but the novel really takes off--into Nathaniel West country--when Artie follows Lily to a London ready to burst from catastrophic rains and the accumulated poisons of decades of official greed and neglect. This is a powerful portrait of cities, and people, wobbling on the edge. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Location, location, location. Who wouldn't think of ex-cop Artie Cohen (Hot Poppies, 1999, etc.) as a downtown kind of guy on hearing him wax rhapsodic over his loftwith views of Soho, Tribeca, and Nolitaas he sits on its rooftop nibbling smoked mozzarella with Lily Haines, his smart, hip, long-legged, red-haired ladylove, watching her adopted Chinese foundling splash adorably in her baby pool? But a call from Sonny Lippert, a pal from Artie's days on the force, drags him ever upscale, first to tony Sutton Place, where self-exiled Brit Tommy Pascoe's near-beheaded corpse is found floating in the exclusive pool of his exclusive co-op, then to a Brighton Beach nightspot, where rich Eurothugs flaunt their Versaced Natashas, and, finally, to bloody Londonwhere, before her suicide, Tommy's elegant widow Frankie assured him it would all endracketing around the overdeveloped Thames riverfront with a staggering trail of corpses in his wake. Given the sexual discrimination of a coon hound and a gun fetish that would make Charlton Heston proud, Artie may be somebody's idea of a hard-boiled hero, but his prose is strictly Velveeta. Would Philip Marlowe describe his case as ``the geoplastic phase of those volcanoes . . . the lava that keeps coming at you, getting bigger, moving faster''? --
Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
