Review of The Bloody Meadow by William Ryan (Mantle, 2011)

Militia captain Alexei Korolev is still living with the ghosts of his last major case when Colonel Rodinov of the NKVD security service asks him to investigate the supposed suicide of a young woman, Maria Lenskaya. He has little choice in the matter since the directive has come the Commissar for State Security, with whom she was having an affair. With good reason, Korolev fears political cases; this is after all the period of Stalin's great purges, and a wrong step by Korolev will have knock on consequences for his family and colleagues. Moreover, the young woman died on the film set of The Bloody Meadow that is being shot at an agricultural college near to Odessa on the Black Sea. A thousand kilometres outside of Korolov's usual patch of operations, and in the heart of Ukrainian resentment at the ravages of collectivisation, his presence as investigating officer is hardly welcome. Quickly establishing that Lenskaya was, in fact, murdered he starts to try and determine who killed her. The case though is not straightforward and seems to hint at a conspiracy against the state.

I thoroughly enjoyed Ryan debut novel, The Holy Thief, so I had high expectations for The Bloody Meadow. It's a good read, but doesn't quite match the quality of the first book in the series. The Holy Thief had a claustrophobic and tense atmosphere, with a very tight plot. The Bloody Meadow is more expansive, felt a little looser in the plotting, and Korolov as a character is little developed in terms of backstory and personal life. And because there is a lot going on and there is a big cast, the development of characters in general is a little bit too much surface and not enough depth. There are also some unlikely coincidences, which enable a couple of characters from the first book to appear in the second. That all said, the book does have historical richness and The Bloody Meadow is an enjoyable read, and if I hadn't read the first book I'm sure this review would read more positively than it might seem. To be clear then, I am still recommending it as worthy of a look and my sense is that this is a series with a lot of potential. Personally, I hope the third book is set back in Moscow, allowing a further engagement with the militia and pathology characters from the first book. Regardless of setting, I plan to read it.

The Bloody Meadow

Having thoroughly enjoyed William Ryan's The Holy Thief, I popped into a bookstore today and bought his new novel, The Bloody Meadow. The blurb runs thus:

Following his investigations in The Holy Thief, which implicated those at the very top of authority in Soviet Russia, Captain Alexei Korolev finds himself decorated and hailed as an example to all Soviet workers. But Korolev lives in an uneasy peace – his new-found knowledge is dangerous, and if it is discovered what his real actions were during the case, he will face deportation to the frozen camps of the far north.

But when the knock on the door comes, in the dead of night, it is not Siberia Korolev is destined for. Instead, Colonel Rodinov of the NKVD security service asks the detective to look into the suspected suicide of a young woman: Maria Alexandovna Lenskaya, a model citizen. Korolev is unnerved to learn that Lenskaya had been of interest to Ezhov, the feared Commissar for State Security. Ezhov himself wants to matter looked into.

And when the detective arrives on the set for Bloody Meadow, in the bleak, battle-scarred Ukraine, he soon discovers that there is more to Lenskaya's death than meets the eye.

If the book is of the same quality as the The Holy Thief, then I think Ryan will be onto a winning series. A kind of Bernie Gunther series set in Russia during roughly the same period.