Londongrad - Softcover

Reggie Nadelson, journalist and film-maker, is the author of seven novels featuring her New York detective Artie Cohen. Her non-fiction book about the singer Dean Reed, Comrade Rockstar, is being filmed by Tom Hanks and Dreamworks. She divides her time between London and New York.

New York police detective and Russian immigrant Artie Cohen is looking forward to a week’s vacation (crime-novel heroes should know better than to take vacations) when he agrees to deliver some books to an aging fellow Russian living near Brighton Beach. On the way, he finds a dead body wrapped in silver duct tape from head to foot, a signal from the Russian mob to keep your mouth shut. Quickly, the trail leads to Artie’s best friend, nightclub owner and possible gangster Tolya Sverdloff, and his daughter, Valentina, with whom Artie, despite a 20-year age difference, is in love. As the pace quickens and the body count mounts, Nadelson follows the money (and, in the new world of Russian full-frontal capitalism, there is still plenty of it) from Manhattan to London to Moscow. There is an almost surreal fury to the action in an Artie Cohen novel, and if the narrative voice seems to falter now and again, such infelicities of style are quickly forgotten as one’s pulse rate accelerates. Best of all, though, is the neon-bright portrait Nadelson paints of the new Russia, awash in sleaze and dirty money. --Bill Ott