Snow Red - Hardcover

Lowndes, Natalya

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340559772 ISBN 13: 9780340559772

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992

Synopsis

This is the third novel by the author of "Chekago" and "Angel in the Sun". Set in 1987-8 on the eve of perestroika, it traces the search for the murderer of Professor Oliver Slater, from England to Moscow and back again.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Lowndes ( Angel in the Sun ) threads this perestroika -era thriller with suspense aplenty, but the even greater virtues here are her highly original prose and her dead-eye lampooning of the best and worst of both the British and the Russian national characters. At the center is Kitty Slater, a beautiful Russian emigree struggling to exist in England after her older, wealthy husband has been murdered during a trip to Moscow. Kitty can barely speak English, much less read it, and she invites the aid of Archie Renshawe, a bailiff who has come to demand payment of her husband's debts. Archie and his Indian partner, Nazir, start out by translating Kitty's mail, but when Kitty receives a windfall, she hires them to accompany her to Moscow to track Slater's killer. Moscow seems surreal as Archie and Nazir meet Kitty's circus friends, her ex-KGB ex-lover, a peculiar policeman and Slater's unsavory contacts. Lowndes's inventive language ("This professor evidently wrote as he'd lived, heart and soul in every sentence. Even the punctuation looked throbby.") expands to convey both hysterics and despair, both the stalwartness of the English bailiff and the skewed dimensions of a Moscow stuck in a cultural time warp. A vibrant romp.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0340559772
• ISBN 13: 9780340559772
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 262