The Bone Records by Rich Zahradnik

Zahradnik provides a different venue than one I’ve read before. The main locale is in the Coney Island section in New York City and the surrounding area which is dominated by Russian immigrants, an area known as Little Odessa. Along with the immigrants were former KGB agents and Russian Mafia figures. The plot contains crooked US law enforcement figures including in the NYPD and FBI. The protagonist is Grigg, the son of a Russian immigrant and his Jamaican wife. Grigg looks brown, not like the Russians. Despite having grown up in Little Odessa, he knows his skin color makes him unaccepted by most of the Russian community. 

 

After the reader meets some of the key players in the story, we learn that Grigg has been looking for his father who disappeared about six month earlier. Suddenly his father appears in the midst of a chase for his own life, and then is murdered in front of Grigg. Grigg had good things to say about his father who had always been a good and responsible father since Grigg’s mom died of natural causes when Grigg was only 18 months old. As Grigg begins his search for what happened, struggling to figure out who he can trust and who is corrupt, the reader also is pulled along in what seems like an impossible scheme to unravel.

 

The term “bone records” refers to an old method for listening to music pirated from the US to Russia when Grigg’s father was a young man. Somehow records for listening to music were created on old x-rays, and those x-rays were typically of various bones, whether they were skull x-rays or some other bony structure. The records were sold on the black market. There appears to be a connection to Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election in the US, but that is never fully explained. There is also a tie into a shipment container which turns out to have a significant amount of gold bars and American cash. Grigg has an ex-girlfriend who is killed as this story unfolds, but by this time, Grigg has become more interested in another woman who remained a bit mysterious right to the end of the story.

 

While I found the Little Odessa part of this story to have great interest, I certainly had a hard time following the plot and figuring out who was who and what alliances were trustworthy. I can’t give this novel a great rating, but it did have some curious and redeeming features.

 

WCD