Vodka [Paperback]

Boris Starling (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 7, 2006

Beautiful American banker Alice Liddell arrives in Moscow as it reels under a war between mafia gangs for control of the violently changing city. Hired to oversee the privatization of Russia's vodka distillery, Alice finds her ideals compromised by its director, a dangerously seductive gangland member. When an enemy vows revenge on him, and a series of bizarre serial murders erupts, Alice finds herself drawn into the violent underground world of Moscow.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this dense, captivating novel of modern-day Russia by Starling (Messiah; Storm), stunningly beautiful American Alice Liddell arrives in Moscow in 1991 as the city lurches into a changed world after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She's an International Monetary Fund adviser whose job is to privatize Moscow's state-run industries, the first of which will be the legendary Red October vodka distillery. Red October is run by Lev, who is seven feet tall, built like a professional weight lifter and covered with tattoos. The charismatic Lev is not only head of Moscow's largest gang, the 21st Century Association, he is also a parliamentary deputy. Alice and Lev engage in contentious negotiations over who will control the factory, and in no time at all romantic sparks fly. Starling fuels his many story lines—one involving a gang of brutal Chechens; another featuring Juku Irk, Russia's only honest policeman—with an abundance, some might think an overabundance, of facts about life in Russia. While most books would founder under the weight of such extensive research, this great mass of detail is so fascinating that delighted readers will gulp it down like the novel's free-flowing, ubiquitous vodka.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

American Alice Liddell, for whom all bottles urge "drink me," arrives in Moscow at the collapse of the Soviet Union to oversee privatization of the iconic vodka factory Red October. She soon sluices down an alcoholic rabbit hole to an anarchic realm whose magnificent squalor recalls declining Rome under the bloody dominion of proud Visigoths and Huns--or, in this case, Slavic gangsters and their Chechen rivals, notable for being more sadistic than even the Slavs. Against the offhand cruelty of this decadent panorama, where thieves have more honor than bankrupt ideologues and cutthroat capitalists, and where cannibalism isn't always figurative, a good cop's hunt through the sewers for a serial child murderer is unremarkable enough to seem a reflexive carryover from Starling's more personal serial-killer titles (Messiah, Storm). Much more dense and descriptive than these earlier efforts, this sprawling spectacle is awash with detailed background, punctuated by swift and ruthless action that sweeps in off the steppes with bloodthirsty ferocity. Recommended for fans of Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko books, or Robert Harris' evocative thrillers. David Wright
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Onyx (February 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451412060
• ISBN-13: 978-0451412065
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #440,701 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Forget Messiah, there won't ever be another..., May 9, 2004

By 

Amy Battis (Beverly, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vodka (Hardcover)

I considered it a tremendous find to see this book peeking out at me in Duty Free at Heathrow Airport on my way home from Europe recently. I've been such a fan of Boris Starling since Messiah, and have been hoping, nay, praying, for another page turner. Sadly, Vodka is not it.

At just over 500 pages, Starling takes too long to tell the story, or stories, as there are multiple here and sometimes you wonder if it is indeed worth the effort of keeping up with them. While the background on the vodka industry and the mechanics of business and mafia in Russia were interesting enough, only the last 75 pages or so had the type of suspense we would hope for from Starling and the ending was a bit too pat for me. The "killings" were too few and far between for a book 500 pages long...I just never felt there was much of a threat there, although the story behind them was a bit of a surprise.

Easily, this could've been told quicker and more effortlessly by Starling. I won't give up on him though, I'm already waiting for his next.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting background but unlikeable characters, January 31, 2005

By 

AnnaKarenina (St Petersburg, of course) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vodka (Hardcover)

Vodka is an average thriller set in a more interesting than average background - post-Communist Moscow, Russian mafia, KGB leftovers and all that. What lets it down most are implausible and unlikeable main characters.


Alice Liddell is an American who feels Russian in her heart, despite acting like a spoilt Western brat. She's a banker, financier, heavy drinker, smart & sexy & beautiful, a skilled investigator, an unfaithful wife to a boring respectable husband, a coy & pasionate mistress.

Lev is a 'vor', a member of an elite criminal brotherhood, the leader of a Slav criminal gang, and a Parliamentary Deputy, and a Gulag survivor, and the head of the largest state-run Vodka distillery, big, imposing, muscular, with a hard washboard stomach...you get the drift. It's nothing like this author's very good first book Messiah, which among other things had distinctive yet convincing characters.


Things get worse when this pair of course fall in love, as they always do in this kind of book. This tiresome situation is described in near Mills & Boon style - glances across the room, blushes, fingers brushing, heated abandon. In between all this there's murder, gang wars, revenge, and plenty of vodka consumed to get through the story. The plot even picks up near the end, but by then I disliked Alice so much it was a lost cause.

There are worse books than Vodka, but if you like post-Soviet thrillers there are many better - re-read any of the Martin Cruz Smith 'Arkady Renko' or Donald James 'Vadim' books. If Soviet-era
police procedurals might be your thing, read the excellent and original (but hard to find) Stuart Kaminsky 'Porfiry Rostnikov' books.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An honest review, October 7, 2009

By 

Jan Triska - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vodka (Hardcover)

Vodka is a sprawling, impossible novel. Starling accomplished a few things, notably a somewhat lurid portrayal of post-Soviet Moscow in the throes of privatization and a wave of mafia violence. As far as the characters go, I found them somewhat ponderous and slightly unbelievable. It's easy to like Lev, until one realizes he's just as ruthless of a gangster than any others. It's easy to be intrigued by Alice, until we find she is more of an alcoholic than anything else.
The plot has so many twists and turns that it lost me somewhere along the way. As someone who'd been to Moscow in mid-90s, I did find that the atmosphere and the political commentary rang true, for most part. I could have done with less graphic violence, fewer shoot-outs and fewer torture scenes, but that's just my taste in literature.
The storyline of an honest cop tracking a serial killer/deranged Afghan war veteran, well, it's a good try but it really takes the attention off what is already a busy main thread of the book. It all conveniently comes together in a weird and sad ending. All too conveninetly, in my opinion.
All in all, Starling took on a huge and complicated array of subjects and constructed almost too many complex characters - perhaps two shorter books or an immense, 800 page novel, would have done this tale a justice.