July 2015 - Snowdrops by Miller, A.D.

You grasp the tenor of this book as soon as you realise that the eponymous snowdrops are not the beautiful white flowers that push their way through the snow in the Lake District alongside the daffodils. Rather they are the corpses in Moscow that poke up in the melting snow of Spring; corpses that might be homeless people or drunks or even victims of murder. One such is revealed, with his leg stuck out of the boot of a car and already smelling unpleasant, outside the apartment of Nicholas a young British expat lawyer. Although the story of how this body got there is rather a side issue, it serves to set the scene.
Nicholas is the narrator and the reader follows his progress as he becomes ensnared by two beautiful Russian girls and separately by a wheeler dealing Russian conman in a cowboy hat. By the time he comes to suspect - rather later than the reader - that he is being used he is in too deep to extricate himself or doesn't want to in case it jeopardises his relationship with Masha. This leads to them conning a little old lady out of her apartment with the promise of a better one out of town. In Russia similarly conned people become snowdrops as in the original corpse in the car.
The book received many glowing reviews and not only on its own cover. However the group was for once as one in thinking the cover came from a different book. There was a feeling that the book was chillingly accurate in its portrayal of a corrupt and immoral post-Soviet Russia but that the characters themselves were not well filled out, being almost shadowy caricatures. Maggie called it a thriller without the thrill, a description we liked and this was particularly true because the narrator is telling this to his new fiancee back in England so that we know he emerged relatively unscathed - although this relationship was unlikely to survive the telling. There was a feeling that Nicholas himself was not entirely credible in his naivete as he was a lawyer who had been four years in Moscow.
The marks were so uniform as to hardly need Peter's mathematical skills.

Marks 5 (one 6 balanced by a 4, all the others gave 5)

Nb Ros read it in 2013 and has the photo to prove it.