Synopsis
A reluctant investigator, a sordid English seaside town, a criminal underbelly.Trouble has a habit of seeking out Konstantin, whether he wants it or not. Starting from the moment he arrives in the seedy seaside town of Margate where he’s supposed to be in hiding from his ex-employers. All Konstantin wants is to keep his head down and be left alone. But it’s not to be. People have their problems and Konstantin can’t help but get involved.Konstantin has to overcome the drug dealer, the loan shark and a Liverpudlian gangster. Then there’s the so-called good guys, the councilors and lawyers who are worse than the criminals. Enter Fidelity Brown, aka Plastic Fantastic, a dominatrix who has her own mélange of secrets and lies, and nightclub owner Ken who’s connected to all the wrong people. Both help Konstantin solve the cases dropped on his doorstep.Cue deception, murder, mayhem as the Russian settles into his new life. Margate will never be the same again. And neither will Konstantin…Meet the enigmatic Konstantin, a man with a dark history and darker future in the start of a unique crime thriller series laced with a healthy dose of black humour. Pick up Russian Roulette to find out what all the fuss is about.
My Review
I have been a fan of Keith’s for a little while now. However, I have a slight confession to make. Prior to being invited to take part in the blog tour for ‘Russian Roulette’, I hadn’t actually read any of the Konstantin series before. Oh the shame. However I have now read the first in the series and I can guarantee that I will definitely be reading the other books in the series just as soon as I can. I absolutely loved ‘Russian Roulette’ but more about that in a bit.
What can I say about Konstantin? He is a former KGB agent but he is currently on the run from his employers. He certainly isn’t doing a very good job of blending into the crowd as it were. Trouble seems to find him wherever he goes and being the former agent that he is, he cannot help but become involved even though he claims he doesn’t want to. Konstantin is the sort of person, who would find the needle in the haystack because it would be embedded in his bottom- that’s the sort of luck he has. I liked Konstantin and took to him from the beginning of the book. He strikes me as being a bit of a lovable rogue with a whole library full of stories to tell. He would definitely be a fascinating person to chat to and a psychologist would have a field day with him!
‘Russian Roulette’ is simply an unputdownable read. For me, the book was one hell of an interesting book and I became addicted to reading it. The book wasn’t exactly glued to my hand but it might as well have been because it came everywhere with me. It took me a matter of hours to get through the book but I didn’t realise just how long I had been reading until I looked at the clock and realised three hours had gone past. I was so focussed on the story that I took no notice of the world going on around me. I just couldn’t tear myself away from the story, the black humour, the characters and from the author’s writing style. The author has a writing style, which grabs your attention from the start and keeps it throughout the book. I have to say that I loved the dark sense of humour in this book and I found that I was chuckling away to myself all the way through the book.
In short I thoroughly enjoyed reading ‘Russian Roulette’ and I will most definitely be recommending this author and his books to other readers. Now I just have to go and find the pennies to buy the rest of the series and discover what fate has in store for Konstantin! Happy days. Keith Nixon is an author who is vastly underrated- well not any longer and not if I have anything to do with it. The score on the Ginger Book Geek board is a well deserved 5* out of 5*.
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