Snow Drops by A.D. Miller
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This isn't the book that I thought it was going to be. Big play is made on the blurb of the "snowdrops" of the title, the bodies that come to light in the Russian Spring thaw, but as a metaphor for the plot it is a bit strained. It's a phrase I've come across before in Kurkov's Death and the Penguin, which likewise looks at the corrupt society created in the post-Soviet cash free-for-all, but with a wittier manner. So this book isn't the crime thriller it is dressed up to look like.

The atmosphere of Moscow is authentically created, and I recognised the city and the hotel I've stayed in very well, when I visited it at about the time that the book is set, though I maybe saw it through less cynical eyes than the main character. However it is hard to feel for the English lawyer at the centre of it all, as he is eternally telling you how the story will end, he just comes across as a fool, and the symmetery of the two storylines I found a bit too clunky.

I was a bit disappointed by it.

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