The Burning Lake: A Volk Thriller

Readers who relish the darker side of today's Russia will welcome Ghelfi's fourth thriller featuring spy Alexei "Volk" Volkovoy (after The Venona Cable). One cold winter night in a Moscow park, Volk rendezvous with a gulag survivor who tells him that Katarina Mironova, a fearless reporter who writes under the name Kato, has been shot to death along with three students in a village in the Urals. Kato, who joins the list of 21 journalists who've been murdered since Vladimir Putin ascended to power, was working on a story about an area in the Urals where a reservoir holding liquid radioactive waste exploded in 1957, causing widespread contamination. Since Kato was Volk's lover and confidante while she was covering the second Chechen war a decade earlier, Volk resolves to get at the truth behind her murder. The twisty trail eventually takes Volk to Las Vegas for an exciting showdown with a notorious French assassin. (May)