Grimly Soviet reading: "Moskva" by Jack Grimwood

Moskva announces what it wants to be (or at least what its publisher wants it to be) on its cover, where a promotional roundel announces "Fatherland meets Gorky Park". That, in the thriller business, is setting your sights pretty high, but it has to be said that Grimmond delivers: this is a high quality effort, more than a cut above your average summer beach read.

Gorky Park is the more apposite of the comparisons, as Moskva is a crime thriller set in the Soviet Union of 1985, at the moment of Gorbachev's ascendency to the Party leadership, and a slight opening of horizons that came with that. Not that you would really guess that from this story, which draws on the past, as far back as Stalingrad and the capture of Berlin in 1945, to build its plot. (Interestingly, Grimwood's acknowledgements include mentions both of Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad and Keith Lowe's Savage Continent as source material for this novel.)

The central protagonist of Moskva is Major Tom Fox (in non genre-conforming fashion referred to as "Tom"), who has been posted to the UK embassy in Moscow, we swiftly understand, to keep him safely out of the way of a parliamentary select committee which might ask awkward questions (awkward for whom is not completely clear) about his prior service in Northern Ireland, which we understand through constant flashbacks to have been undercover, violent and traumatic. Tom Fox is damaged goods in other ways too, his daughter a recent suicide, his son neglected and estranged, and his marriage collapsing messily. Tom, an ex-seminarian to boot, is supposed to write a report on the role of religion in the Soviet Union (with a view to its potential to destabilise the regime), but nobody seems to take the task too seriously. In any case, everything is derailed when the British Ambassador's teenage stepdaughter, Alex, vanishes, and Tom, possibly in search of redemption for his guilt over his dead daughter, takes upon himself the task of finding her and bringing her to safety.

The plot is intricate and complicated, bringing Tom into the orbit of miscellaneous apparatchiks, KGB officers, politburo members, gangsters, war veterans and drunks (all these categories overlapping) as well as the almost compulsory sexy-scary icy-eyed female internal security officer, Major Svetlana Milova. (A Cold War book like this without a sexy KGB Svetlana is almost unimaginable, right?)

OK, that is perhaps a rather cheap shot, as what Grimwood does with this menagerie of characters, including with Major Milova, is almost always unexpected. The twisty-turny plot is one thing - sometimes, I confess, tricky to follow - but the real strength of Moskva is the un-thriller-like depth of characterisation and psychological complexity the writer builds in, even to relatively secondary characters. Take care about making up your mind too quickly about them, as they can turn round and surprise you. These characters are layered against what almost amounts to an extra character in the novel, the wonderfully-evoked Soviet Union of 1985, in winter of course, with its vodka-soaked bleakness, interminable shortages and general shoddiness, all experienced with a resigned cynicism by its inhabitants.

Jon Courtney "Jack" Grimwood

As a thriller should, Moskva builds tension superbly as it brings us closer to the serial killer who emerges gradually from the shadows of history, and to the climax of the search for young Alex. My only objection would be the horribly sadistic nature of the crimes Tom is confronted with. Such graphic awfulness is apparently de rigueur for the modern thriller writer, but I confess I could live without it and don't feel the need for detailed anatomy lessons to add spice to a narrative.

That unfashionable thought aside, Moskva is a high-grade thriller offering tense, page-turning reading deepened with memorable, well-developed characters and a wonderfully evoked Cold War backdrop.