Dead Meat

In contemporary Russia the only paint is green, toilet paper costs a week's pension, and dead lightbulbs are a precious commodity. This is the world inhabited by a nameless, cuckolded Moscow investigator, a lawyer by training, who is sent to St. Petersburg to seek out possible corruption in the Central Investigating Board.

The man from Moscow finds himself teamed up with a gruff, seemingly honest inspector named Grushko in the investigation of the murder of a famous journalist. To the St. Petersburg cops, and in particular the single-minded Grushko, the crime is obviously the work of the Russian Mafia, a combative and bloodthirsty league of Georgian, Azerbaijani, Ukrainian, and Chechen criminals who deal in everything from fake Rolexes to stolen meat. ("We'll never defeat the Mafia," one policeman says. "It's the one thing in this country that actually works.")

Then hoodlums suddenly start dying and Grushko and his shadow from Moscow must surmount their own doubts about each other to solve a crime that goes well beyond Milyukin's murder.

Set against the sad, beautiful backdrop of a once grand city now populated by an extraordinary cast of cops, hard-currency whores, materialistic yuppies, pimps, and "made men," Dead Meat is a superb, hard-edged suspense thriller. And with its echoes of Dostoyevsky, it is also an unforgettable literary journey through the strange and blood-soaked landscape where everyone is guilty of something, and punishment comes in many forms.