Tangled Web UK Review October 2007
The Adversary by
Michael Walters
hbk out September 07
Published by Quercus
at £12.99
The author has followed up his first book in the series The Shadow
Walker with another set in the same very unusal location and with the
same pair of sleuths. The stories concern the Serious Crime Team of the
Mongolian Police, based in the capital Ulan Baatar, but with more
excursions into the bare landscape of the steppes that reach up to the
mountains and down to the Gobi Desert.
The main character is Nergui, a mature detective who until recently ran
the SCT, but has been kicked upstairs to a more political role in the
Ministry of Justice.. He has been chasing Muunakhoi, Mongolia's prime
criminal for two decades, but the gangster has eluded justice all that time.
Now at last brought to a trial, it collapses as the defence show that a
detective in the Team falsified evidence. Nergui's protege Doripalam, his
successor as Team Leader, is under censure for the fiasco and is on the
point of resigning.
A young man vanishes, his mother is murdered and the police officer who
falsified the evidence is on the run to escape Muunakhoi's retribution and
the action becomes fast and furious.
Apart from the energetic story line, the book is fascinating because it
sheds light on a little known-country, one of the most sparsely-populated
in the world, which after a glorious if bloody past under Genghis and
Kublai Khan, lost its identity to China, then the Soviets, but in 1990, re-
remerged as a democracy. The author describes well the decline of the
first flush of private enterprise and the new opportunities from the
mineral wealth - as usual grabbed by interests outside the country,
providing a fertile ground for greed and corruption which fits well with
his story of organised crime.
Another intriguing aspect is the stark contrast between the avidly-grasped
Westernised life-style of the city and the nomadic life of the adjacent
herdsmen, whose round tents encroach right up to the city limits.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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