’Cruz Smith not only constructs grittily realistic plots, he also has a girl for characterisation of which most thriller writers can only dream’

--Mail on Sunday

’Cruz Smith writes extraordinarily well in a genre not usually considered literature... [He] is not merely our best writer of suspense, but of one of our best writers, period’

--New York Times

Sometimes Arkady had the feeling that while be bad been away God bad lified Moscow and turned it upside down...The nighte outside was still white. Arkady wasn’t sleepy or hungry. He felt like the perfet new Soviet man, designed for a land with no food or drink.He got up and left the offfice,Enough.

It began with the unmourned death of Rosen, one of Moscow’s new breed of black marketeers: seemingly a clear-cut case of murder.

Ahhough Renko has been recently reinstated at the Moscow Prosccutor’s officc, the case begins to slip fiom his grasp. But his determination never to let go leads him to Munich and Berlin - back into the life of Irina, a woman he thought he had lost forever...