Ben Creed (2022) A Traitor’s Heart.

Posted by celticman on Tue, 07 Apr 2026

A Traitor’s Heart is the second in a trilogy of books featuring Revol Rossel, a former militia lieutenant in Stalinist Leningrad. His nemesis, Major Nitkin, who literally cut short his career as a prodigiously talented violinist in the Leningrad Conservatory by cutting off two of his fingers and mutilating others, but also has the top-level connections in the Kremlin to protect him.

At the beginning of the A Traitor’s Heart, Rossel is so far North, his Arctic camp doesn’t even have a name, barely a smudge on the map. In order to survive the day-to-day grinding down of zeks in the gulag at temperatures below 30 degrees Centigrade, he has to find someone to hate. Rossel’s hate is channelled towards Nitkin.

Major Nitikin, the state-security apparatchik, and torturer is again his saviour. They team up again to solve a series of murders. ‘Some secrets won’t stay buried’ is the tag line on the cover.

Is book 2, book 1 (City of Ghosts), with different clothes on. Well, yes, more or less. But it’s just as entertaining.

Named after a figure from Slavic folklore, Koshchei the Immortal is the murderer haunting Leningrad.

His signature: victims’ tongues removed and replaced with slips of Italian verse.

Victims offer clues which echo musical motifs, which Rossel decodes intuitively. Being a detective and being a musician are different ways to look at the world and bring the truth into focus.

There’s purity to Rossel—and his search for Galya, his twin sister who went missing when they were both eighteen (who flickers into life in book 3, Man of Bones)—in which his wound is his light. Music carries him to higher spheres, provides the plot scheme and gives him a reason for continuing, when all around his is madness and disorder, dressed as a belief in the Stalinist rightness in its leftness in a dying regime, which makes it more unstable.

Tanya (Vassya) Vasilievna the ex-pilot returns from the City of Ghosts for a brief cameo. But now Rossel in addition to investigating the serial killings is also uncovering their links with Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) related to Gotterdammerung—Wagner’s Opera—and the Nazi’s Twilight of the Gods inside Hitler’s Bunker 12th April 1945, which those near to Stalin covet. The personal is the political. Stalin trusts no one, including himself.  But we can trust Rossel.

WMD are quite a topical issue nowadays. So we’ve been continually told. Read on.  

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