The Half Life of Valery K -- by Natasha Pulley

 

There has to be a sequel in the works. The characters are too well developed to be completely abandoned and left in a new situation in the UK.

The name Half Life also leaves questions in a reader's mind. It just didn't seem like it did end. Or should.

This picked up steam and rolled to an end with Vitaly picking up the former KGB agent Shenkov at a regional airport in northern England where Vitaly Kolkhanov had been hidden in a protective program, and given a new safer job. The relationship between Valery and Shenkov started edgily, but hardship and events at City 40, plus their mutual experience in Lubyanka prison, brought them close together. A little vodka helped, too.

Things weren't safe or healthy when he was sprung from a gulag to work at an atomic-polluted place called City 40 in 1963. A catastrophe happened there in the late 1950s that contaminated most everything in a 60-mile radius.

This is a work of historic fiction, and I had to really knit-pick to find anything that resembled an error. Some of the UK-based phraseology while still in Soviet Russia could've been stronger in clearer global English. If there is such a thing in that widespread language.

I won my review copy through a Goodreads lottery, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I will be looking for that sequel. The author's flashback chapters were very effective.