Londongrad

This is an entirely riveting crime novel that travels from the Russian criminal underworld of London to Russian Brooklyn and Russia itself. "Londongrad" opens on the fringes of New York, where Brooklyn abuts on Queens and where planes heading for JFK fly in low over the Jamaica wetlands. Russian-American PI Artie Cohen finds a dead girl wrapped from head to toe in silver duct tape – 'Mummy Girl', she is dubbed by the newspapers. Along with his new sidekick, Bobo Leven, a twenty-eight-year-old detective who still lives with his Russian parents in Brighton Beach, Artie hunts for the killer, a hunt which leads him to London – or 'Londongrad'. Londongrad is emigre home to a quarter of a million Russians – the oligarchs, City traders, restaurateurs, asylum seekers, the rich and not so rich, who create a Little Russia in the heart of Britain's capital. Here, a new Cold War is played out against a setting of huge country houses, and lavish London apartments, in restaurants and Orthodox churches and bars. In Londongrad, oligarchs employ squads of former SAS men as bodyguards, buy football clubs, and – perhaps – plot the overthrow of President Putin.