The Stone Bridge
On 3rd June 1943, two bodies are found in the heart of Moscow near the Stone Bridge. It looks like a teenage quarrel and crime, the young man shooting his attractive girlfriend then turning his pistol on himself. Both of the dead are children of top Soviet officials, close to the Emperor Stalin, and the case is “investigated”, stamped and consigned to file with indecent haste. An outcast ex-FSB (Russian Internal Security) agent is part-hired, part-blackmailed into re-opening the case of “The Young Wolves”, so long closed and mostly forgotten. But as he, and his team, digs deeper than the official investigation, he realises that he’s opening old wounds and casting a light on an area of Russian history which the State insisted remained in shadows and forgotten. Translated from Russian, this book has moments of intrigue and moments of frustration; the reader becomes intrigued with the actual, real-life crime yet frustrated with the tangential nature of the “investigation”. It offers good snapshots on Russian life, in both the extreme atmosphere of Stalin’s iron rule and Russia of the 2000s.
