Fiction, Mystery & Crime, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

Archive 17

Name: Archive 17
Author: Sam Eastland
ISBN: 9780345525734

by Sam Eastland

Write a review

Overview

Stalin’s most trusted secret agent, the legendary Inspector Pekkala, is on his deadliest mission—one that could save his country . . . or plunge it into the abyss.

It is 1939. Russia teeters on the verge of war with Germany. It is also on the brink of bankruptcy. To preserve his regime, Stalin orders a search for the legendary missing gold of Tsar Nicholas II. For this task, he chooses Pekkala, the former investigator for the Tsar. To accomplish his mission, Pekkala will go undercover, returning to Siberia and the nightmare of his own past, where he was once a prisoner in the notorious Gulag known as Borodok.

Pekkala must infiltrate a gang of convicts still loyal to the Tsar who, it is rumored, know the whereabouts of the precious gold. He soon learns that the best-kept secrets are those that no one even knows exist.

In the brutal frozen fortress where his survival once made him a myth, he begins to unravel the true identity of a murdered inmate, whose own mission to Siberia has lain buried for years deep within the mysterious Archive 17, where long-lost files obscure a shocking conspiracy that could decide the future of the Soviet Union itself. As more people die around him, Pekkala must decide where his true loyalties lie, or else take his place among the dead.

With the superb research and stunning suspense that are his trademarks, Sam Eastland delivers his most powerful Pekkala novel yet—the best in a mystery series riveting readers and reviewers alike.

About the Author, Sam Eastland

Sam Eastland is the author of Shadow Pass and Eye of the Red Tsar. He is the grandson of a London police detective who served in Scotland Yard’s famous “Ghost Squad” during the 1940s. He lives in the United States and Great Britain and is currently working on his next novel.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

Publishers Weekly

The pseudonymous Eastland’s excellent third thriller set in the Soviet Union under Stalin (after 2011’s Shadow Pass) makes the most of the remote location of much of the book’s action—Siberia. Countless lives hang on the caprice of Joseph Stalin, including that of Inspector Pekkala, a former czarist guard who served time as a political prisoner before becoming Stalin’s (mostly) trusted investigator. In 1939, the dictator sends Pekkala to his old labor camp, Borodok, to look into the murder of Isaac Ryabov, a former cavalry captain and one of the last surviving colleagues of Colonel Kolchak, a close ally of the Russian imperial family. Pekkala must go undercover to catch whoever slit Ryabov’s throat and stay in the good graces of Stalin, who fears that Ryabov’s demise may pose a threat to his rule. Eastland (British author Paul Watkins) captures the brutality of Borodok and the barren desolation of the surrounding area, while maintaining a consistently high level of suspense. Agent: Jason Cooper, Faber & Faber. (Mar.)

Kirkus Reviews

Set in a Siberian labor camp, this atmospheric (read: brrrr!) thriller finds Nicholas II's one-time special investigator on an undercover assignment from Stalin to solve a cold-case murder--and find the long-dead tsar's hidden supply of gold. Inspector Pekkala is more than a little familiar with Siberia. Banished there after the fall of the Romanovs, he spent nine brutal years in a forest marking trees, a job no man had previously survived for more than six months. Now it's 1939. The world order is crumbling. Russia's treaty with Germany is shaky. America is poised to enter the war. Stalin needs that gold, and now. In Shadow Pass (2011), the previous entry in this series, Pekkala investigated leaks in Stalin's secret tank-building program. Now, the former Finnish soldier must not only uncover the mysteries behind the murder--the victim was falsely identified as the imperial officer in charge of transporting the gold--he must also unravel the secret plot that put his own life at risk. Returning to the gulag, where barrels of formaldehyde await fresh cadavers for medical research, he faces an immediate scary threat from the surviving members of the fight-till-they-die Comitati band. The nomadic Ostyak tribe, which butchers hopeless "escaped" convicts who aren't killed by the cold, lurks on the outskirts of the prison. Fortunately, Pekkala has a few people watching his back. He'll need them in a saga involving trained assassins, harsh betrayals and sudden reversals. It's a bit hard to believe the hero is as sane and centered as he is following his gruesome ordeal. But while not on a par with Martin Cruz Smith's Renko novels, Eastland's third Inspector Pekkala entry is a model of narrative control and intricate plotting.