Rostnikov's Vacation by Stuart Kaminsky

Probably the best thing I've ever gotten from any of my book clubs was the discovery of Kaminsky's Inspector Rostnikov novels.  I have been reading them slowly over the last year or so, as I sometimes burn out on authors when I read too much of their work in a short time period.  This is the seventh in the series, and looking at Wikipedia I see that I missed the sixth.  Perhaps that's why this one felt a bit disconnected from the others, like quite a lot of time had passed and we'd picked up in a very different place.

And, actually, we have.  This book came out in 1991, and Rostnikov and Russia are dealing with Gorbachev's reforms, Glasnost and Perestroika.  It's an unsettled time as things have changed, but they haven't completely settled yet into a new order.  And things are quite unsettled with both the police, for whom Rostnikov works, and the KGB.

At the beginning of the novel, Rostnikov has been ordered to take a vacation and sent to Yalta with his wife, who is recuperating from surgery.  He runs into and renews his acquaintance with another policeman who has also been ordered to take a vacation.  His friend cryptically tells him that he is working on something of a mystery, and then he dies under mysterious circumstances.  Naturally Rostnikov must investigate, since local authorities are anxious (or lazy enough) to declare it a heart attack.  Add to that his puzzlement at being tailed by a fairly senior KGB agent for no reason he can fathom.

Meanwhile his colleague, Emile Karpo, has also been ordered to take a vacation.  But Karpo is a man of strong duty and no social life, so he tells his superior he's headed to Kiev to visit family, but continues investigating the case that he and Rostnikov were working on when ordered to leave.  This leads to his witnessing a murder, and puts him on the trail of an unstable drug addict on a crime spree.

His other colleague, Tkach, is still in Moscow, working on a case in which computers are being stolen from Jewish men.  He behaves, as he often does, like a young idiot, and spends the rest of the book sorting out his stormy emotions because of it.

As usual with this series, I enjoyed the novel.  Despite all of his superiors' attempts to tread on Rostnikov's career and marginalize him, he keeps coming up with the answers.  But I also like Rostnikov himself.  This is very human and sympathetic writing, from his limp and near-constant pain from a very old injury, to his not always harmonious relationship with his wife, to his sympathy for many of the victims and even sometimes the criminals they deal with.  These novels are about believable people who are not hotshots or success stories, who are doing their best to get through life and generally do more or less the right thing.  A pleasure, as usual.