Red Icon
This fifth book in Eastland’s Inspector Pekkala series begins with the accidental discovery of a lost icon in the crypt of a bombed church in 1944. When Stalin charges Pekkala, the legendary Emerald Eye, to investigate, a dark and complicated adventure begins which takes Pekkala back into his past as the Tsar’s favourite secret policeman and foreshadows the uneasy peace of the Cold War era. The novel is a thrilling romp through Russian history from 1915 to 1945. The brusque but fair-minded Finn, Pekkala, is a gallant maverick in the tradition of Philip Marlowe whose quasi-marital relationship with his sidekick, Kirov, echoes great policing partnerships from Holmes and Watson to Morse and Lewis. Eastwood’s arch-villain, a monstrous, hideously mutilated religious fanatic, is terrifying yet comprehensible in the way of Frankenstein’s Monster. A distinguished supporting cast includes the doomed Tsar and Tsarina, Rasputin, Stalin and Hitler, and Eastwood manages to give all these a fair hearing. In his skilled hands, no-one is a cliché.
Eastland writes well. His prose is elegant, his observation acute, and he handles a complex chronology with assurance. He mixes lyricism and compassion with high drama and scenes of very grisly violence in a way which keeps you permanently on the edge of your seat, never knowing when a description of great art or grand scenery or even someone’s wallpaper is going to segue into a nightmare of butchers’ knives and chemical warfare. He is also very funny, particularly when writing about human relationships with exasperating technology – broken-down cars, wrecked tanks, a world dragging itself out of total war in which the only machine which actually works is the hangman’s drop. A thoroughly enjoyable read.
