Penzler Pick, December 2001: This is a compulsively readable tour de force that keeps more balls in the air than a pitching machine. On top 
of that, in this 14th novel featuring the one-legged Moscow cop Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, Stuart Kaminsky once again catapults us straight
 from our armchairs into the mindset of modern Russia in all its perverse dysfunctions.
Kaminsky must have had fun cooking up the plotlines, which ingeniously plunder the storage bins of mystery history. There's everything from a 
Jane the Ripper to homages to train-bound thrillers like The Lady Vanishes, North by Northwest, and the more obvious Murder on the Orient Express.
 At the same time, there's the conscious, skillfully presented element of social realism, an aspect that never intruded into the action of any of
 those tales. Kaminsky is wonderfully artful at conveying the pervasive cynicism that comes with the territory at all strata of existence in the
 former Soviet Union, and he does it without ever being repetitious. At an organic level, it seeps into and informs every level of the mystery as it unfolds.
      *** ✔️WARNING✔️ ***
*** ✔️Ebook in epub format✔️ ***