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Customer Reviews of Black Knight in Red Square

Back in the USSR
Kaminsky is an incredibly prolific writer, but I'd never read anything by him until now. This second book in his long running series starring Russian police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov blurs the line between detective fiction and international spy thriller. What begins as a poisoning case linked to the prestigious Moscow International Film Festival soon ties in to a terrorist plot to set off remote control bombs at Soviet landmarks in Moscow. The result is a book that's partly excellent and partly silly. The silly part is this idea of a fictional international terror cell seeking to destabilize both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. It may be the distance of some twenty years since the book was written, but the whole presentation of their aims is laughable.

However, when Kaminsky sticks to his hero detective and his capable underlings (especially Ivan the Vampire), the book is outstanding. It's a common enough trait of police procedural series that one of the key obstacles the detective faces is his own bureaucracy. This is certainly the case for Rostnikov, however the novelty of the Soviet system keeps the book interesting. Not only the political machinations, but the day to day corruption and seedy underbelly of the socialist capital make the book well worth reading. There's just enough of the private lives of the Soviet cops to round things out nicely. On the whole, an intriguing book despite the laughable villains, and one that'll have me seeking out others in the series.

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Black Knight In Red Square
This book is a very suspenseful book. When you first start to read the book you are instintly wraped up in the book. It gives a great information on Russian history, along with the famous buildings in Moscow. This book is about a Chief Inspector named Porfiry Rostnikov would is put on a case that involves 4 men all posined on the same night in the same Moscow hotel. He learns that these murders are done by a darked eyed women who is a terriorst and has many more plans into embarassing Russia. It is up the the Inspector to stop this women before she commits more harm.

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Book 2 in the Rostnikov Series
It starts out as a not so simple poisoning of four during the Moscow film festival. Not a good thing and it gets worse when Rostnikov determines that one of the victims is an American investigative journalist. Further digging brings in the KGB, an international terrorist brigade and more deaths. And, as expected, Rostnikov and his assistants, work in and around the system to solve the crime(s).

I enjoyed this story a great deal though not as much as the first book - Death of a Dissident. What I like most about the Rostnikov series is how a generic, could happen anywhere, crime story is altered when seen through Soviet eyes. Dissident was a 100% Soviet story and that was part of it's charm. The introduction of a number of international players in this book somehow blurs the distinctiveness of the earlier book.

As the child of a WW2 veteran, I'm also struck by how Rostnikov, also a WW2 vet, has some of the same "Greatest Generation" traits. Somehow this is a group that is both patriotic yet willing to work outside of the system if the system gets in the way of, say, fixing a toilet. Read the book and you'll understand.