This is
the second instalment of Tom Callaghan’s Inspector Akyl Borubaev series, and
follows directly on from the author’s debut, A Killing Winter. I thoroughly
enjoyed that novel and gave it a 5-star review and so was looking forward to
reading A Spring Betrayal
Luckily
this did not disappoint. In A Killing Winter, our protagonist, a detective of
the Bishkek Murder Squad (Bishkek being the capital of Kyrgyzstan) had to
grapple with the vicious slaying of a government minister’s daughter. It was a
police procedural with a raw heart, a brutality imbuing the novel that
reflected the impoverishment of that Central Asian republic. A Spring Winter
follows very much in the same path, only now after the events of the previous
novel, Akyl Borubaev has been exiled to the far corner of Kyrgyzstan. This time
he unearths the bodies of several children, abused, tortured, and buried in the
frozen steppes. The corpses all bear wristbands identifying them as orphans in
the care of Kyrgyzstan’s creakingly decrepit state orphanages, and having
himself grown up in one, this affects him deeply.
I always
try to stay clear of divulging too many spoilers in my reviews, so I will
simply say that the plot of A Spring Betrayal doesn’t pull any punches. It
covers child trafficking, child rape and pornography, snuff movies, and the
corruption that makes all this possible. Real monsters populate the pages of
this novel and it’s not suitable reading for the feint hearted or those looking
for a cosy mystery in the vein of Miss Marple or Poirot. But then it doesn’t
pretend to be and if like me you like your crime fiction gritty, nourish, and
with an iron-lined stomach, then this could well be the book for you.
If I have
cone criticism of A Spring Betrayal, it’s the same one that I levelled at A
Killing Winter, and that’s that the author seems to have a thing for the femme
fatale. In his previous novel that was Saltanat Umarova, the mysterious beauty
from Uzbek intelligence. She appears in the second novel but her character is a
little more fleshed out here. But now the author adds a second femme fatale,
Albina Kurmanalieva, former Uzbek security and now freelance assassin and
torturer. In A Spring Betrayal Albina is something from a James Bond movie,
glamorous and beautiful yet deadly. It’s not that I object necessarily to such
characters, just that I find them a little clichéd. One day I’ll read a book
where all the assassins and spies are kind of average in the looks department,
or heaven forbid, a little dowdy.
But as
with Callaghan’s debut A Killing Winter, none of this ruined the book for me,
and I enjoyed A Spring betrayal immensely. It has a real sense of place about
it and I felt immersed in the post-Soviet poverty of Callaghan’s Kyrgyzstan
which he vividly brings to life.
4 out of
5 stars
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