Brian Haig has a running series of legal mysteries set in the Army that follow Army smart aleck lawyer Sean Drummond, but this is not the latest in the Drummond series.
It’s the early 1990’s. The Soviet Union is teetering on the verge of collapse. Alex Kornevitch is a college student with an entrepreneurial spirit and a really sharp eye for making money . . . a whole shit load of money. He gets run out of college by the government because his capitalistic tendencies run counter to the old ways. Problem is that this golden boy is now the face of the new Russia and a target of the Russian Mafiya. To protect himself, he hires a former honcho from the KGB to be head of his security team. Probably his one bad decision.
Some communist holdovers work out a plan to discredit Alex and his wife, steal all his money and companies, kidnap and torture them before finally killing them as an example to others of his ilk; and just guess who is behind the plan . . . his head of security. But Alex is not only smart; he is a very quick thinker and manages to bluff his way to a position where he and his wife can escape, but where to? The old KGB network reach extends all over Europe and Asia. There’s always the USA.
Once in the US, Alex picks up where he left off, scoring big and leaving a bit of a trail that the KGB bad guys eventually find, but Alex manages to hide behind US legalities. In the meantime, the FBI director meets with Kremlin higher ups about placing a few more agents in Moscow to track the Mafiya in the US at its source in Russia. He is surprised to learn that the Russians are more than eager to allow this intrusion on their soil and suggests the FBI put an even larger force than the Director asks for with one catch – give us Alex Kornevitch.
The Director, through the immigration service, manages to put (notice I didn’t say ‘arrest’) Alex in prison on a technicality. But Alex is quite bright, managing to survive and even thrive no matter how deep a prison hellhole he is placed. In the end, we can’t wait to see Alex’s day in court and the eventual comeuppance to the FBI Director and the folks who attempted to bring Alex down.
Just because this isn’t a Sean Drummond novel doesn’t mean it’s to be skipped. I guess this could be called a political mystery-thriller. In the end, this is first-rate legal fiction easily on a par with John Grisham or Scott Turow, at least in my mind. The story is fast paced and the plotting is both ingenious and believable, partly because this is a fictionalized account of a real circumstance.
East Coast Don
No comments:
Post a Comment