I found this in the bookshelf of Casa de los Suenos and picked it up after finishing the two books I had carried along to this piece of paradise. Neat taut reading so far, I am writing this from near Tulum and I am about 200 pages into the 600+ plot.

I read most of this book in a wonderful house we rented on Soliman Bay, a little-known part of the Maya coast, north of Tulum and away from the scary cement giants that were built in and around Cancun. Before getting there, however, I also brought it along on a visit to Chichen Itza, which is where this photo was taken.

I enjoyed the book. I read a few bad reviews on Amazon, but I disagree with most of them. Although the plot is not as eventful you would expect from your average best-seller, there's never a feeling of the author wasting pages. Every chapter screams to be read, and what might seem slow to a Ken Follett reader is in fact the deep texture this book provides. I do not know Russia, and I can't judge how realistic the book actually is. It did sound believable to me, with just that much exaggeration as you expect from a work of fiction.

After a while the story does tend to give a feeling of too much happening to too few people - something I often get when I enjoy a new episode of the brilliant TV-series "24"... I thought another similarity with the Kiefer Sutherland starrer is the fact "Vodka" has characters that have to sometimes do bad stuff in order to get things done.

All in all, the book made me want to learn a little more on the fall of Soviet Union and on what happened during the transition to capitalism. Coincidentally, a few days after I finished the book I read a twin interview to Gorbachev and to the guy who organized the coup that erased him from the political scene. I was grateful to Boris Starling for giving me a fictional background to give some context to the period.

I am extremely surprised this was never translated to Italian. I have my copy available for anyone who wants it - especially in my country. Unless I decide to release it first!

How nice to open my mailbox and find something different from well known and far from unexpected bills to pay, tempting me in darkness, enveloped in a mysterious patchwork paper... My friend Alberto used mail for a targeted release of this book about which we already talked by telephone. It will be a pleasure for me to read it and maybe also for my wife, and then comment on it together. After that, if I'm fair, but really only if I am a fair bookcrosser, it will be my turn to release it in wild Switzerland...