You know things get really hectic and overwhelming at work when I start to read in Russian. I almost never read anything in this language because there is simply nothing to read. Russian literature has been dead for decades and there are no signs of it coming back to life. Marinina, however, is a mystery writer I’ve been reading for exactly 20 years. She was huge back in the 1990s, and it’s kind of hard to let the characters go if you’ve followed their lives for two decades.
This book is Marinina’s most recent installment in her long-standing series about a slightly autistic, gauche yet brilliant detective Anastasia Kamenskaya. It’s extremely hard to write police procedurals in Russia where convincing the readers that there are police officers who not only take bribes but actually investigate is next to impossible. The very genre of a procedural implies the existence of a procedure that people at least try to follow. And Marinina has to work very hard to make her detectives with their sincere desire to solve crime believable.
In order to compensate for the too-honest-t0-be-true detectives, the writer sets the mystery in the world of figure skating which, as you probably know, is the most corrupt sport of all. I knew it was a very dishonest sport but after reading the book (based on very painstaking research, by the way) I will never watch another figure skating competition or performance in my life. The sport is inhuman, cruel, and involves a lot of really harsh abuse of the poor children who play it.
The mystery was fine but it’s missing the beauty of the author’s novels from the 1990s. It feels like the author was more at home back then and is not fully integrating herself into the twenty-first century. However, the omniscient narrator says “in Ukraine and Belarus” instead of “at Ukraine and Byelorussia”, which shows to me that she is a decent person and makes me enjoy the book more.
Author: Aleksandra Marinina
Title: Ангелы на льду не выживают
Year of publication: 2014
My rating: 5 out of 10
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