For only 262 pages Eastland packs quite a punch. In this installment Pekkala is sent back to the same Gulag where he spent nine years in exile. Stalin has ordered him to solve the mystery of a murdered inmate so Pekkala has to go in as a prisoner. Could there be another reason for sending Pekkala in to solve this murder mystery? Well you won't get me to spill the beans. I really like how Eastland puts the historical info at the end of the book about the fight for Siberia as it really lends credence to his novel. Very good stuff and a must read for fans of The Emerald Eye. “Archive 17” by Sam Eastland“I’m sending you to Siberia.”In October 1939, Russian Bureau of Special Operations investigator Pekkala faces his worst nightmare. Only a few years after being released from the frozen hell of a gulag prison camp in Siberia, he is ordered back to the same prison, this time undercover to investigate the murder of a prisoner. Only two people will know he is not a real prisoner, the prison commandant and Joseph Stalin, the man sending him there.Prisoners are murdered every day in the prison work camps, but Stalin is inordinately interested in this prisoner and will go to any length to have the killer found…yet he keeps his reasons secret and will not allow Pekkala to know why. The investigator once known at The Emerald Eye must walk a dangerous line between discovering enough to satisfy Stalin and learning too much to be allowed to live.Pekkala’s formidable skill in criminal investigation made him invaluable to the late Czar Nicholas II in the days before the Glorious Revolution. Those same skills enabled him to survive his years in the gulag. Now they make him just as valuable to the man who ordered the Czar’s death, as well as the deaths of countless others.There is a sly humor threaded within this story that pops out at unexpected moments, relieving the darkness of the tale with most of it directed at a blundering bureaucracy. Also present are many passages that approach poetry. This sentence from the first page serves as an example. “Then he drew a knife from the folds of his clothing, cut the man’s throat, and held him like a lover while his heart bled dry.”“Archive 17” is a novel of death, deceit, and despair in Stalinist Russia, replete with the violence men do, wolves who wait in shadowy forests, armored locomotives lumbering across the empty Siberian landscape, and the strength-stealing, unimaginable killing cold that is always and forever with you.Reviewed by Andrew MacRae for Suspense Magazine
What do You think about Archive 17 (2012)?
Stalin sends Inspector Pekkala back to the Siberian prison camp to investigate a murder.
—NikkieLeann
I won this book for free through Goodreads First Reads. Hope to read it soon. Thanks.
—El1
A very good Inspector Pekkala novel. The Rasputin cameo was particularly well done.
—asia
I just like to note that I read this under the title of Red Siberian
—Skysky
