Ben Creed (2021) City of Ghosts.

I’d bought this book for 20 pence. I’d read the first page and thought this iit pretty good, which was a mistake, because it’s great. I read the start of the book during a hospital appointment and finished 410 pages later.

I liked the Social Realism.

Ben Creed is actually two writers: Chris Rickaby and Barry Thompson.

I’m not sure how that works, but it does. I’m going to read their follow up books set in the same milieu, which is the USSR, one of two superpowers, following the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War).

Thomas Hobbes maxim, life in its natural state is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,’ without political authority and a powerful Leviathan to enforce the will of the people is something Stalin was expert in. The Soviet State is the foundation of security and civilisation.

To think differently was something most Soviet citizens tried not to think about. The costs were enormous. Ten, Twenty, Thirty years in a gulag. Or a quick bullet to the head.

This is the opening gambit in Creed’s five-act structure, which corresponds with five frozen corpses found neatly arranged on a railway line outside Leningrad on Saturday, 13^th October 1951. Accidental death is ruled out. The corpses have been mutilated. Faces sheared off. Teeth taken out. Missing hands. The killer has made an effort to make tracing them difficult, but has also dressed them in bizarre uniforms to individualise each corpse as if sending a message to those investigating the crime.

Revel Rossel, lieutenant in the Leningrad milistaya, has drawn the short straw. He has to lead the investigation. The ticking clock. Lavrentiy Beria had soft hands. He was second only to Stalin and feared more. Head of the MGB. He had taken an interest in the case and wanted it closed before the 19^th November. Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky is to conduct The Blockade, honouring the worst months of starvation and bombardment in which the Leningrad Radio Orchestra performed Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 inside the besieged city as an act of cultural resistance and Soviet defiance.

Case closed. Find some victims to feed to the MGB or become a victim, with your family following behind?

Rosel has intimate knowledge of how the Soviet authorities act and react. He was once a virtuoso violinist in the Leningrad Conservatory. The best of the best. A throwaway remark and his fingers were cut off and maimed. His chance of salvation was in the Death Squads flung at German and Finnish troops to stop their advancement. His love of music deformed as his life as a low-level enforcer for the state.

Yet the five corpses take him back to his glorious past—and his not so glorious future. I guessed who the killer was quite early. That makes me quite brilliant or he’s there in plain sight. The latter, obviously. But well plotted in a too-good-to-be true way. Read on.

Notes.    

  https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6