Whiskey Priest

by Alexander J. Motyl

Book Overview

Themes of identity, faith, and redemption combine as a disillusioned KGB assassin and an insecure female U.S. diplomat track down an Ivy League professor running a prostitution ring in Ukraine.

Anatoly Filatov is the "whiskey priest," a despairing Communist true believer, whose world comes crashing down with the collapse of the USSR. Jane Sweet is the foreign-service officer, a Ukrainian-American woman who discovers her identity, as both a woman...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0595343678
• ISBN13: 9780595343676
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

kozak/springfield

Fast moving murder mystery in Eastern Europe: Vienna, Kiev, L'viv Ukraine. Gives historical snapshots of the mid and late 20th century, along with local color of the present day cities above. The surprising twists and turns keep the reader guessing. For one who knows these areas, the novel is a fun commentary.

Whiskey Priest - a riveting post Soviet, post Cold War crime novel.

Whiskey Priest is more in the tradition of Graham Greene and Alan Furst than John Le Carré. While Furst has developed a flair for writing historical novels situated in Europe during the late 1930s and early war years of 1939 and 1940, Alexander Motyl captures the strange twists and perversions of post-communist transitions for characters operating in Vienna as well as Kyiv and Lviv in Ukraine after the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union. Entangled in a web of international intrigue, the main protagonists feature a Russian Communist who assassinated Ukrainian nationalists for the KGB but now works as a hit man for the Russian mafia, a bright young American diplomat struggling to come to terms with her Ukrainian-American identity, and a Soviet émigré to the U.S. who, in Motyl's devilish words, becomes "a cynical Ivy League professor" involved in sordid activities such as larceny and running a prostitution ring in Ukraine. A distinguished professor and author of many scholarly works as well as an accomplished painter, Motyl displays in Whiskey Priest a new talent for writing historical fiction. His first crime novel is a gem.