Customer Reviews

The evolution and determinants of emerging market credit spreads in the 1990s / Steven B. Kamin and Karsten von Kleist

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Mysteries are about my favorite genre. I've read the Grishams, the Georges, and the Charles Todds, as well as the Rankins and the Grimes books and the Stephen Whites. The Arkady Renko novels of MC Smith are way different. W-a-a-y different.

Arkady is as disillusioned as Rankin's Inspector Rebus, and he inhabits a similarly difficult work environment---only worse, because in Russia it hasn't been so long since non-conforming could get you dead, and the atmosphere of danger has not entirely dissipated. The plot of this one involves the part of the population that still looks back to the Stalin era with some nostalgia (go figure) and a subgroup of that population that finds recreation in digging up WW2 battlegrounds. Like Civil War buffs, but with issues. It also involves Arkady's unwillingness to give up on a woman who has left his bed for another man's, and a feral boy who occupies his household part of the time.

People who claim we are all fundamentally alike and should therefore just "get along" would do well to read these books. We ain't there yet, if Arkady Renko is to be believed.