I really tried, but I just can't get into this. Everything's just so bleak and slow and leaden, in all possible respects, and then there's all those *people* to keep track of, and the *politics*, and all those different types of agendas... I finally realized that picking this book up was like taking a trip to the dentist, every single time. So no, I'm not finishing this.
Too bad, because subject-wise this was right up my alley, and the two MCs are great -- I just wish the authors knew how to infuse their sentences with life. I was expecting a nice juicy sandwich, and then Netgalley handed me rusk. I might return to this one later, but for now, I'd rather read something else.

I haven't read the first book in the series but didn't feel like it affected the story at all. I enjoyed this book and found myself hooked from the first chapter. An intensely gripping thriller. I need to go read the first book now.

This is the 2nd Revel Rossel book and I’m reading in close order to the first so was well prepared for the style writing.

This atmospheric and macabre feeling thriller begins in the frozen Siberian Tundra where Rossel has has been cast out to Gulag by Captain Nikitin. The man who sent him there at the end of first book. Nikitin arrives to break Rossel free as he needs his assistance with a serial killer who is loose in Leningrad.

As with the first book there is a strong Musical influence throughout that though interesting sometime feels a bit too much as does some of the descriptive writing, However that doesn’t really detract from what is an extremely well written, strongly paced, brutal thriller.

Some of the plot doesn’t stitch together quite right, but looking past that it’s a quite enjoyable, intelligent read and Rossel is a character who I have enjoyed reading and a series I shall continue on with if there are future books.

Hell’s sniper

This is the second Revol Rossel thriller, and a worthy successor to the first. While it can be enjoyed on its own terms, I read the first for continuity’s sake.

I find myself currently knee deep in novels featuring Josef Stalin, The Outfit and Sell us the Rope (young), Katastrophe and A Traitor’s Heart (old). In all of them his shrewd and ruthless cruelty are evident. Life in the Gulag also seems to have made a comeback – A Traitor’s Heart opens with ex-policeman Rossel concealing his past to survive the gangster lords of his Siberian prison camp. His unlikely rescuer is his erstwhile enemy/ ally Major Nikitin from the first novel.

Sprung from his prison camp, he works with Nikitin to track down a serial killer in Leningrad, whose trademark is to shoot the victim twice in the head with a sniper rifle. All the victims appear to have been in the past part of a crack brigade of soldiers from Stalingrad and present at the fall of Berlin. This is all gory stuff, spiced up with a hint of Nazi atomic secrets and a heroic general from WW2 who may still have high ambitions for himself.

I confess I did not find the plot of this thriller entirely coherent, but that might just be me. What it delivers with notable success is a breakneck narrative and a 1950s Leningrad suffused with fear and paranoia. There is again a musical theme to solution of the story, as in Rossel’s first case. And with the introduction of Khrushchev to the political mix, I can foresee more dangers for Rossel and Nikitin in future volumes.

Loved the first book in the series , this is even better . Great plot , terrific characters, brilliant historical fiction mixed with real characters and events

Coming from a close country to the old Soviet union, I can see and understand all the events from this novel, be there fictional or reality facts.

The first book ended with Rossel being taken prisoner in a work camp in the Arctic Circle.

Nikitin, the major who incarcerated him, is ready to negotiate his freedom for finding a criminal on the loose in Leningrad.

Rumor has it that there’s a legendary villain that is hunting veterans and torture them by cutting their tongues and other unthinkable practices.

I’ve always heard about not trusting anyone around you, not even your family members. All because the government has ears and eyes everywhere. And many scenes in the story seem to be taken out of the cruel reality that was hidden behind an iron curtain, unfortunately.

I really enjoyed this second installment in the series and I’m looking forward to read more in the future.

It’s twisted and gripping, with many unlikable characters but with a cruel dose of reality.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Wellbeck Publishing UK for an advance copy of A Traitor’s Heart, the second novel to feature investigator Revol Rossel, set in Leningrad, 1952.

Rossel is a prisoner in a work camp in the Arctic Circle when Major Nikitin, the man who put him there, arrives to free him in return for help in an investigation in Leningrad. Someone is killing veteran soldiers, cutting out their tongues and leaving scraps of Italian poetry in their place. The locals call the killer Koshchei, a mythical figure with limitless capabilities.

I am in two minds about A Traitor’s Heart. I can admire the amount of research that went into the novel and the clever mixture of fact and fiction, but I felt that the plot got a bit lost in all that detail. I never felt that I had a firm grasp of it, and, yet, that may be the point as everyone was on shaky ground in the Stalinist regime.

I like the plot premise, a serial killer in a country that ostensibly has no crime, but it gets taken over by power politics and the attendant treachery and back stabbing, which interest me less. I was impressed by how the authors got from point A to point B and even more so by all the twists in the latter part of the novel.

The historical detail is very interesting and led me to my friend Google to get some background on the unfamiliar era, not so much the terrorisation of the populace and how it was done, but the characters and where they fit in and the alphabet soup of competing law enforcement (?) agencies. I’m still not sure of the latter and I found it confusing.

Overall I found the read muggy. I didn’t understand all of it and the shifting allegiances and lack of trust between the characters contribute to this, but on the other hand this impression seems to sum up exactly the situation the comrades found themselves in.