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Sunday 9 November 2014

Death Sentence, by Alasdair Donaldson

This a brief review of the latest book, (available on your Kindle for £1.99) by Alasdair Donaldson, the son of Tricia and George who have a house in Winchelsea. Alasdair's first novel was Prospero's Mirror, a ghost story set in Oxford, dealing with the life of M R James. Death Sentence has a very different background: Russia, and  specifically Siberia in the last days of the Czars and the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution. It is an autobiographical tale by a 17 year old convicted of assassinating a member of the Russian nobility. He consequently finds himself incarcerated near Lake Baikal in an isolated Siberian Gulag inhabited by thousands of convicted murderers and run as a brutal slave labour camp. A series of bizarre killings leads to an investigation which, given the presence of so many suspects, has a very unexpected denouement, which explains some myterious deaths that had occurred some years earlier. A well-paced story of 20 short chapters, it seems to me very good value for both the cost and time invested in reading it.

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