Song For Katya Kevin Stevens Pocket Books pbk £6.99 Sept. 2005 Gwen Moffat

Gwen Moffat’s day job was rock climbing and she broke moulds. As the first woman guide she carved a niche in the macho world of professional mountaineering; as a crime writer she specialises in wild country. Her main protagonist, Melinda Pink, follows her creator’s interests: surpassing her in some, falling short in others. Miss Pink is an intrepid rider but not much of a climber, she is a perceptive investigator and a large woman of imposing presence. Her latest novel is DYING FOR LOVE, published by Constable Robinson.

In a bitter winter during the Cold War four American musicians are invited to Russia where they exchange sweet jazz for severe culture shock. Two of the visitors are black, one Japanese, the other white, with a chequered past involving heroin. The former addict is the most sensitive, the pianist and a composer, the organiser of the tour. Married to an ageing cosmonaut, Hero of the Soviet Union, upper class in their hierarchy where class is based on power and influence, Katya has children and an extended family dependent on her exemplary behaviour. She is Caesar’s wife, but she is also sensual and fiery and she embraces passion well aware that Damocle’s sword is suspended above her by a hair. That the lovers are middle-aged, have been around, known many loves, adventures, horrors, ensures that they fall the harder. It is immaterial whether they are in love or lust, they are in the first flush of adoration, exquisite and mad, but they are in Russia, and doomed.

Their story is told badly, the style unsophisticated, even fulsome where music and first love are concerned, but coming close to the knuckle as the former junkie recalls a heroin high. However, style or the lack of it, make no odds in the face of the background. Here is the gloom of Moscow’s suburbs, the faded glory of Leningrad (that was St Petersburg); and there is the enormous contrast between the lifestyle of the elite (Guicci, Armani, abundant food) and the squalid conditions endured by the majority.

Song for Katya is a thriller, the suspense unnerving. It is not a conventional novel any more than a novel set against the Holocaust of the gulags could be so termed. Without a murder or explicit violence, under a crust of precarious luxury and grinding struggle for survival Stevens depicts all the obscenities of a police state operating to crush the people’s spirits in addition to their limbs. We are left with an impression of something monstrous and animate, a force of which men: KGB, apparatchiks, lesser bureaucrats, are merely the trained minions. The ultimate horror is that, in Steven’s book, American, in the form of the CIA, is in collusion.