Archive 17 (novel)

I did not like this book.  Although it literally says on the cover that this is "a novel of suspense" it was just plain not suspenseful.  And what's with the weirdness of that phrasing? "A novel of suspense." Was there some reason the publisher didn't go with plain ol' "suspense novel?"

For transparency's sake, I read this a while ago and I'm just now getting around to publishing this review. I had a couple notes, but don't remember much of it so this will be brief.

One of the secondary characters is Stalin.  Literally Stalin. And he's made out as some kind of horrible boss rather than a dictator who officially executed nearly 800,000 people and unofficially probably killed several million more.  (I had to look up those stats...)  In the novel though, Stalin plays practical jokes on his secretary by sawing the legs off of his desk and is constantly bellowing about stuff.  Now, the practical joke thing may be a real thing that Stalin did, but I just don't picture him bellowing.  Yelling yes.  But bellowing?  To me that choice of word evokes an image of some farcical character, rather than a real person.  I don't know if I have ever witnessed someone doing something that I would describe as bellowing.

And then the writing was just bad in a lot of places. Here's an example of one paragraph from the book:

"In the center of the compound, a guard was kneeling on the ground, a rifle, with bayonet attached, propped against his shoulder."  "But then he noticed that the rifle wasn't resting against Platov's shoulder as he had first imagined.  In fact, Platov had been stabbed through the throat with the bayonet, which now protruded from the back of his neck. Platov was dead, propped up by the rifle, which had prevented him from falling."

I've tried to picture this scene a dozen times and I just cannot imagine how someone could think someone was holding a rifle only to notice "oh wait, that bayonet is actually through him. Silly me."

Honestly, it just now hit me after re-reading this with fresh eyes that "propped against his shoulder" meant resting, like rifles are carried when marching.

Up until this point, I was picturing someone holding a weapon like they were going to shoot.

So you can understand my confusion about how someone with a bayonet through the neck could be confused with someone holding a rifle like in the second picture. So I guess it wasn't as bad as I originally thought. But I still didn't like this book.