The Moscow Connection - Hardcover

The collapse of communism hasn't eliminated Russia as a setting for novels of suspense and intrigue. Set around the 1991 coup attempt that toppled Mikhail Gorbachev but failed to reassert hardline Communist rule and while leading inadvertently to the collapse of the Soviet Union, this vigorously researched but hamfisted thriller from the author of The French Connection turns on the risk of the Russian mafia stealing and reselling nuclear material and weapons. Just before the failed putsch, master criminal Slava Yakovlev, aka ``the Jap,'' imprisoned in a cell whose bribe-begotten comforts temper its Siberian setting, manipulates his release in order to fend off challenges to his far-flung empire and implement the mother of all crimes. The Jap puts into motion a complicated plan by which his underlings extract brutal revenge on the KGB officers who gang-raped beautiful young Oksana Martinov-whose father is the government official who arranges for the Jap's release. After the collapse of the coup attempt, the now free Moriarity of the Motherland enacts his plan to sell radioactive goods purloined from one of Russia's secret nuclear cities to world terrorists. His machinations, involving the massive counterfeiting of American currency, lead to violence in New York, which draws NYPD Special Investigator Peter Nikhilov, son of a Russian emigre, onto the case. Going undercover in Moscow, Peter falls in love with Oksana-a plot element that's nearly as predictable as the climax, which finds the pair trying to escape from a nuclear facility before a thicket of missiles can blow them to kingdom come. Moore's detailing of the Russian mafia and potential nuclear terrorism are fascinating, but garish storytelling gives his cautionary tale an air of pulpish unreality.

Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The author of The French Connection (LJ 7/1/69) presents this "factional" work of events that were allegedly expunged from official records. The all-too-plausible adventure is set in 1991 during the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The Russian Mafia controls Moscow. Based on a real-life leader of the Russian Mafioso, Vyacheslav Yakovlev stages an early release from a Siberian labor camp in order to capitalize on Soviet instability. Yakovlev masterminds a plot to buy nuclear weapons with counterfeit money and then resell them to states such as Iraq and North Korea. Oksana Martinova, daughter of a high-ranking Soviet official, becomes a pawn in his hands. Peter Nikhilov, a New York cop, investigates the counterfeit money and follows it to Russia. Tension mounts as Nikhilov, who falls in love with Martinova, duels with Yakovlev. Fast-paced and entertaining as fiction, this novel is all the more disturbing as an account based on facts. Recommended for fiction collections as well as popular current affairs sections.
Stacie Browne Chandler, Plymouth P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.