Rating: 4/5
Review: Enjoyable period crime
I enjoyed this book - the first of Morris's I had read. Set in Tsarist St. Petersburg in 1870, it is effectively a police procedural with Porfiry Petrovich, Dostoyevsky's detective created in Crime and Punishment, as the main protagonist. It is well written with an engaging central character and a fairly interesting rather than utterly gripping narrative. What gives this book its distinctive character is the setting which Morris manages very well. He settles on a style which conveys the manners and mores of the time and this maintains the atmosphere very convincingly. The historical and political background seem well done (although my very scanty knowledge of 19th Century Russia doesn't make me a good judge of this) and it was this aspect I enjoyed most.
The plot itself is, frankly, pretty run-of-the-mill. Many of the familiar elements of the genre are trotted out: Crimes With No Obvious Link To Each Other, The Obvious Suspect, Political Pressure, Detective Under Threat, Not Knowing Whom He Can Trust, Implausible Flashes Of Intuition and, of course, a rather ludicrous Tense Climax. There is an odd, almost irrelevant sub-plot about ownership of a bank which seems to be there just to illustrate some of the prejudices of the time, and some of the aspects of the plot are a bit clunky. However, there is plenty in the book to enjoy
Four stars is a slightly generous rating, but three stars would have been very churlish and I can recommend this book as a diverting read.
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