Fall of a Cosmonaut
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
With his Edgar Award–winning series about a Moscow cop, “Kaminsky’s a master of tone, maintaining the edgy excitement of suspense” (The Washington Post).
In the 1960s, Russian children wanted to be cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. But the Soviet Union is history, and Gagarin’s glory is long gone. For the men and women aboard the decaying Mir space station, life is an unending series of near-disasters. During one such breakdown, cosmonaut Tsimion Vladovka asks ground control to contact Moscow police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov if anything happens to him.
The cosmonaut returns to Earth safely, but a year later he goes missing and his former crew members start turning up dead. Vladovka was in possession of state secrets, so there’s also a potential security risk. He must be found, dead or alive. In the days of the USSR, no one could navigate the bureaucratic maze of the Kremlin like Rostnikov—but he’s never encountered anything like the labyrinth that is Star City, home of the Russian space program. Still, the veteran policeman is convinced: The answer to what happened to the cosmonaut on Earth lies in something that happened in space.
Bringing to life historic shifts in contemporary Russian history, as seen through the eyes of one hard-boiled Moscow cop, “Kaminsky’s Rostnikov novels are among the best mysteries being written” (The San Diego Union-Tribune).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even middle-range Rostnikov is better than much other mystery fiction, as Kaminsky proves in his 13th book about the one-legged Moscow policeman, whose stature and resilience fully justify his nickname of "The Washtub." The three cases that occupy Rostnikov this time around have neither the depth nor the range of the crimes in 1999's exceptional The Dog Who Bit a Policeman, but taken together they do provide a sad picture of a country thrashing about in search of an identity. Rostnikov, a man enough at home in the world to sing softly--albeit in garbled English--the lyrics of a Creedence Clearwater Revival song during a rainstorm, is once again our perfect guide. He and his failed-actor-turned-cop son, Iosef, spend most of their time searching for a missing cosmonaut, one of the crew of the beleaguered Mir space station, who happened to mention Rostnikov's name on a tape before something bad happened in space that made him disappear after his return to Earth. Iosef's lover, Elena Timofeyeva, and her partner, Sasha, are involved with a nasty and pompous film producer, whose epic film on the life of Tolstoy has been stolen by people who want the producer dead. And Emil Karpo, Rostnikov's deliberately unimaginative deputy, is leading the investigation into the murder of an unpopular scientist at the Center for the Study of Technical Parapsychology. All these cases turn out to be less absorbing than they at first seem, but Rostnikov and his team are so vivid and palpable that it almost doesn't matter.
