There is a quote from the Telegraph on the cover above and I really hate (on principle) to agree with anything that esteemed organ says. In this case, however, I can't disagree, this book is better than Child 44, which I very much enjoyed. Historical fiction can get itself into trouble very quickly by attempting to fit a fictional persona around real characters or by failing to invoke a sense of the era in which it is set.
From the outset this work manages to keep from falling into either of those traps. The atmosphere of a Moscow on the cusp of change is described well and our 'hero' - for want of a better word - is grimly believable. The Russian characters across different generations are cleverly drawn without being dragged down to caricatures of good/bad communists or capitalists.
If there was one thing that particularly impressed, it was the pacing of the narrative. Seemingly slow, an awful lot of things are coming together in the first two-thirds that lead to an explosive climax that was as welcome as it was unexpected.
If there is one word that I would associate with the dying days of the Soviet Union, it would probably be melancholy. This book is shot through with melancholy rather than outright misery. It involves various characters pondering on what might have been or could have been, which fits with with the uncertainty of the era.
Other reviews compare Moskva to Fatherland by Robert Harris - a lazy comparison perhaps as a better marker is Archangel by the same author. It is rare these days that I enjoy a work so much that I begin to idly cast a putative TV drama or film, but that was the case here. The BBC made a version of Archangel and (mis)cast a pre-Bond Daniel Craig as 'Fluke' Kelso. I found myself hoping against hope that if Moskva makes it to the small screen that both Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston are otherwise engaged - Tom Fox deserves better than that.
A slight criticism is that the book suffers a little from 'page-turner-chapter-syndrome' with short, punchy chapters designed to reel the reader in. By no means as bad as those dreadful 'thrillers' predominantly from the US where a paragraph is deemed to be a chapter, the story here is strong enough to withstand that particular stylistic trope.
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