Bookreporter.com - VOLK'S GAME by Brent Ghelfi

VOLK'S GAME
Brent Ghelfi
Henry Holt and Company
Thriller
ISBN-10: 0805082549
ISBN-13: 9780805082548

About halfway through this riveting and absorbing work, it struck me that Brent Ghelfi’s debut novel was the product of cross-media influences. It’s as if he had written the book while channeling Mickey Spillane, listening through headphones to “Fun House” by The Stooges and sitting before an enlarged reproduction of the central panel of THE LAST JUDGEMENT by Hieronymus Bosch. VOLK'S GAME is as nightmarish, stunning and brilliant as all of these.

The landscape of the novel is Moscow, where only the truly evil possess the requisite tools for survival. Alexei Volkovoy is a veteran of the Russian Army’s war in Chechnya, a man left permanently scarred and deformed, both internally and externally. Volk is much more than what he seems, a figure of power and inherent contradictions; he is a major force in the Moscow black market while functioning as an undercover agent for the Russian military. Volk’s partner, economically and emotionally, is a waiflike woman named Valya, who is almost childlike in appearance yet is every bit as deadly as he is.

Volk, for all his power, serves two kingpins whose spheres of influence coincide with his own. One is The General, a diminutive but extremely dangerous figure in the Russian Army; the other is Maxim, a Russian mafia kingpin whose tendrils of influence reach into places that even Volk can’t imagine. Both men order Volk to steal an improbable prize, a long-lost fabled painting of Da Vinci’s titled Leda and the Swan. Volk is not the only soul in quest of this work, and the duplicity, subterfuge and death-dealing brutality that he encounters and dispenses during his quest is made all the more mind-boggling by the true-to-life backdrop of Moscow and Eastern Europe that Ghelfi infuses into every page and paragraph of the novel.

One has no idea what is going to happen from moment to moment, and Volk’s cold amorality lends an additional element of uncertainty to the proceedings. This is made more so by the sliver of morality and vulnerability he clings to so that his humanity, already fully submerged, does not drown in the sea of brutality in which he finds himself yet is totally necessary if he is going to complete his mission intact, let alone successfully.

Ghelfi’s prose is like a dark drug that pulls you further under its spell with each taste, so that by the end of the book, the reader is exhausted and, though satiated, ready and frantic for more. The author is reportedly working on a sequel to VOLK'S GAME; it cannot come too soon.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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