Most crime novelists write like spinners on Atkins. Lean, mean tales of tough talking and even tougher thrills in a familiar setting. That's cool when you just want a quick fix. A crime thriller or mystery that delivers familiar thrills on familiar turf. But read enough of those and you find yourself craving for a change of scene. Someplace you haven't read about a thousand times before. Characters that really are different, and aren't named Osama-something, or Sam-something.

Vodka is more than a quick fix. Sure, it's a crime novel, a mystery, a thriller. But it's a hell of a lot more than just that. It's a novel about an entire country during a time of profound, sweeping change. It's an ambitious doorstopper of a book, an epic of emotion and change, politics and economics, war and peace. It's a novel about Russia that reads like a great Russian novel, and comes close to becoming one. Close, but no cigar. I mean, it's no classic, okay? But then again, it's not trying to be Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, just a terrific crime epic. And by that yardstick, it delivers the goods.

It's set in the early Nineties, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and during the tumultous period when the Russian government was trying to introduce American-style capitalism--or heck, at least some American-style capital, period! Things are crazy, inflation is out of control, Moscow is run as much by the crime syndicates, and the long-simmering bitterness between various ethnic groups--the Chechens, the Georgians, etc--is bubbling to the point of outright street war, inflation is out of control, the bread lines are around the block but the supermarkets are filled with imported stuff that costs a fortune, the everyday stresses and tensions are so great that road rage leads to multiple homicide and the police is so corrupt that they actually moonlight for the crime lords at times.

Author Boris Starling paints all of this in brilliant, vivid descriptions that are rich, intense, emotionally involving. This is no Traveler-style travelogue for the rich and famous. It's gritty, down-and-dirty, street-talking, getting down with the Moscow homies kind of stuff. Except that it's Russia, not the 'hood. Starling writes like a slumming homeboy who's really been there, seen that, done his time in the Red Square, and lived to tell the tale--and write the book. His Russia is the most palpable, tangible portrayal I've read in a long time. This is not just damn good research, I'd wager; it's real knowing.

Into this madmaxian chaos he tosses a bunch of extraordinary characters, larger than life--or larger than American life, at least--because in the baroque Russia-in-upheaval of the novel, even these soap-operatic giants seem to fit in comfortably. There's an American woman, Alice, too beautiful for her own good and with a serious alcohol problem that she can't bring herself to accept. She's here to help the Russian government implement the first of its capitalisation plans, the sale and privatisation of a major Russian enterprise, a vodka manufacturing plant. Counterpointing her is Lev, a giant of a man physically and psychologically, one of the most outstanding fictional creations in crime fiction. Like everyone else in Russia, he occupies multiple roles: Owner of the vodka plant, philanthropist and caregiver to a school of orphans--and incidentally, head of one of the biggest Moscow crime syndicates.