After twenty-five years, Gorky Park finally has a worthy successor in Boris Starling’s Vodka—a dazzling, epic thriller set in post-Communist Russia that is filled with crime and corruption, love and death, and the tragic pull between good and evil that nearly brings a once-proud empire to its knees. It is December of 1991, and the Soviet Union has just collapsed. Muscovites are used to lines and empty shelves, but now they have to cope with a dangerous power vacuum— and a war between brutal mafia gangs for control of the city. Alice Liddell, an American banker, has come to Moscow to oversee the privatization of Russia’s most famous vodka distillery—the Red October. Faced with the charismatic, ruthless Lev—distillery director and head of one of the warring mafia gangs—Alice’s very difficult job is starting to look impossible. Lev’s archenemy has vowed revenge on him, and a series of bizarre child killings is only adding to the complications—and the terror—of this dangerously volatile time.