book review - cold blood

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Book review of Cold Blood by the author James Fleming

The surname (he is Ian's nephew) and terse title might lead one to expect something purely commercial and hard-boiled of James Fleming's Cold Blood. But this sequel to White Blood, though in the thriller genre, is both more idiosyncratic and awkward than that. The tone is set on page one with the hero-narrator's introductory self-description: “I, Charlie Doig... six foot two, strong across the shoulders and through the loins.” Set during the Russian revolution and its bloody aftermath, this is as much tongue-in-cheek historical romp as page-turning cliffhanger.

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The novel's opening finds Doig, an entomologist with a taste for derring-do, in western Burma, where he is glorying in his discovery of a new species of jewel beetle. We are briefly whisked back to his ancestral home in Russia - his ancestry is exotically cosmopolitan - for a whirlwind reprise of some of the principal elements of White Blood, notably the rape and torture (so hideous that Doig feels compelled to put her out of her misery with a bullet through the brain) of his beloved wife, Elizaveta, by the evil Bolshevik Prokhor Glebov.

Cold Blood tells the ...

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