Safe Return Doubtful

translated from the Russian by Brian James Baer and Ellen Vayner

This political thriller concerns Russian military aggression over recent years in such places as the Ukraine, Chechnya and Donbas, centring around a hostage situation in a village near Moscow.

The book’s narrator, Pavel, is a journalist, who has become entangled in a crisis when a group of men take 112 people hostage in a church in 2015. By chance, Pavel knows group’s Russian leader, Vadik, as he enabled his release after being captured and held prisoner in the First Chechen-Russian War in 1996. Vadik wants Pavel to serve as one of the negotiators.

As the situation becomes more tense, flashbacks fill the gap in the lives of Pavel and Vadik in the twenty years since they last met; Vadik has turned to terrorism, whereas Pavel has become cynical about the news media, the latter giving Shevelev a platform to voice his own concerns on Russian politics, police and KGB abuses and Putin in particular. Shevelev is a former deputy editor for The Moscow News, and currently works as a freelance journalist for Radio Liberty, amongst others, covering political and social issues in Russia.

It’s a pithy and melancholic political thriller highly appropriate for our times. My reservation is that it’s all a bit too close to the bone for my own appreciation. Some dark humour might have given a respite from the somber seriousness of it all.

My GoodReads score 3 / 5