{"id":6849,"date":"2017-10-16T07:20:06","date_gmt":"2017-10-16T11:20:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6849"},"modified":"2017-10-16T07:20:06","modified_gmt":"2017-10-16T11:20:06","slug":"the-cossack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6849","title":{"rendered":"*****The Cossack"},"content":{"rendered":"
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photo: Ivan Bandura, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By KJ Lawrence \u2013 Though this debut espionage thriller kicks off with a murder in winter 2014, it\u2019s not the usual intercontinental bloodbath. In fact, in a nice twist, the killer\u2014a Russian hit man named Mikhail Petrov\u2014is having serious second thoughts about his choice of career. He regrets the string of corpses he\u2019s left in his wake, and is weighing the likelihood he could change occupations without himself becoming a victim of the SVR\u2014the heir to the KGB. With the death that opens this book, at least he gets what he came for: a set of 18th century banking documents.<\/p>\n

Mikhail is an ethnic Russian who grew up in the Ukraine, and his victim is a young Ukrainian named Ivan, working in London as an assistant to noted photographer Daniel Brooking. Ivan has disappeared, but it\u2019s happened before, and Daniel is not too worried about it until he receives a visit from Ivan\u2019s friend, British intelligence official Anthony Graves. Finding out what happened to Ivan becomes a truth mission for Daniel. All he has to go on are some documents relating to a mysterious financial transaction during the American Revolution.<\/p>\n

Across town, Mikhail Petrov likewise studies the papers he stole from Ivan. Though Ivan had cleverly divided his resources, both sets of documents converge on one location, a bank headquartered in New London, Connecticut. Mikhail travels there, and finds Daniel a half-step ahead of him. In author Lawrence\u2019s hands, the shifts between these two characters\u2019 points of view work well. They\u2019re well-rounded, believable, interesting, and temperamentally different from each other. Daniel may be the novel\u2019s main character, but Mikhail is more sympathetic than you\u2019d expect and has considerably more skills for dealing with the hazards this unlikely duo eventually confronts.<\/p>\n

You can almost smell the dust on the half-forgotten legend they uncover concerning a fortune in gold. What could this far-fetched tale have to do with modern-day Ukraine? Why was Ivan killed for delving into it? A question that does not occur to Daniel, at least at first, is whether poking a stick at this particular bear puts him at risk too.<\/p>\n

Lawrence creates a strong sense of urgency by interspersing a parallel story line involving Ukrainian protests against the Russian-supported government, which peaked in 2014, the time when this novel is set. Ivan\u2019s sister Yana, a physician, is an active participant in Kiev\u2019s independence movement and a witness to the violence perpetrated by the Ukrainian police. Yana is poking a bear, too, determined to put an end to the careers of the worst offenders. Although this thread of the story is thinner than the main tale, it provides a real-life grounding and urgency to Daniel and Mikhail\u2019s activities continents away.<\/p>\n

The Cossack<\/em> is a fine debut, with Lawrence a compelling\u2014and compassionate\u2014author worth watching.
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By KJ Lawrence \u2013 Though this debut espionage thriller kicks off with a murder in winter 2014, it\u2019s not the usual intercontinental bloodbath. In fact, in a nice twist, the killer\u2014a Russian hit man named Mikhail Petrov\u2014is having serious second … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"*****The Cossack - first-rate thriller when a Russian hitman and a London photographer team up to find a modern-day fortune lurking in the mists of history","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,193,40,126,32],"tags":[128,1149,333,1150,1151,129],"class_list":["post-6849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-espionage","category-fiction","category-reading-2","category-thriller","tag-history","tag-kj-lawrence","tag-london","tag-the-cossack","tag-ukraine","tag-wars-and-conflicts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Mt","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6849"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6851,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6849\/revisions\/6851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}