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Title: The Darkening Field

Author: William Ryan

Narrator: Robin Sachs

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-14-12

Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 18 votes

Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

It is 1937, and Captain Alexei Korolev finds himself on an airplane bound for Odessa after the suspicious suicide of a loyal young party member who supposedly had an illicit relationship with the party director. His instructions are to determine if her suicide was actually a cover-up for murder, and if so, to find her killer. She was working on the set of a movie subsidized by the state, and the pool of possible suspects is large and daunting. Korolev finds help from several quarters, but none of them can make up for the one important fact of his case which he cannot discuss. Moral, loyal, and also committed to justice, Korolev is trapped between the demands of the party and those of the truth.

Critic Reviews:

"

Booklist lauded Ryan's first Korolev novel,

The Holy Thief, and this successor fully delivers on the promise of that judgment. Korolev is a wonderful character, a spiritual ancestor of Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko, persevering amid the murderous paranoia of Stalin's Russia. The plot is intricate, the action satisfying, and Ryan's use of period detail, including the brutal 'collectivization' of the Ukraine and that region's nationalist and anarchist movements, makes for exhilarating reading." (

Booklist)

Members Reviews:

Second Book in a Series

I read the first book on Inspector Korolev of the Militia during the beginning of the J. Stalin's reign of the the Soviet Union. Like the first book, this is not a thriller packed with ongoing action of gun play, gore, and mayhem. Rather it is an adventure of a State Militia Inspector tip toeing around delicate social and political times where the slightest provocation can get you arrested and killed or sent to the Gulag in the blink of an eye. And this while attempting to find and arrest the person or persons responsible for a legitimate crime. There are mines, pitfalls and traps along every step of the way and Inspector Korlev is a simple man who tries to do his duty but is very aware of the time he lives in and tries to accommodate the "system" while not compromising his simple beliefs as a decent man hoping to survive the times yet have justice done. Much of the enjoyment of the book is appreciating the nuances of every day living in the Soviet State at that time. And how Inspector Korolev goes about it.

As good as an historical novel as it is as a thriller

Itâs 1937. The Soviet Union, still reeling from its drive to collectivization and the elimination of the so-called kulaks (rich peasants), is now in the grips of the terror Stalin has initiated to purge the Party, the army, and Soviet society in general of anyone who so much as breathes a hint of opposition to him or any questions about the superiority of the Soviet system. Official Soviet figures showed that at least 12 million people died as a direct or indirect result of these draconian policies â and some military historians speculate that the USSR came perilously close to losing World War II because of Stalinâs elimination of so much of the armyâs senior officer corps.

A murder mystery set during Stalinâs terror

William Ryan sets the second novel in his three-book series of murder mysteries, The Darkening Field (The Bloody Meadow in the UK), in the midst of these unsettled times.