The Beast in the Red Forest

June 2, 2014
In Eastland’s engrossing fifth Inspector Pekkala novel, the fourth to be published in the U.S. (after 2012’s Archive 17), Joseph Stalin is worried, though the war is going well by early 1944. Pekkala, an Investigator for the Bureau of Special Operations in Moscow, vanished in 1941 after Stalin sent him on a secret mission behind enemy lines around Leningrad, “to determine the whereabouts of the priceless inlaid panels of the Amber Room, the greatest treasure of the Romanovs, last seen hanging on the walls of the Catherine Palace.” Though the missing inspector may well be dead, Stalin orders Pekkala’s assistant and longtime friend, Major Kirov, to find Pekkala and return him to Moscow. Meanwhile, an American autoworker who defected to the Soviet Union in 1936 has disappeared. Eastland (the pen name of British author Paul Watkins) delivers a surprise ending driven by grievances from the past, brutal betrayals, and the power of friendship.