DS:—that processes fish, and was, uh, pulled out of his enforced retirement to solve a murder onboard that ship. Now he is back in Moscow as a special investigator with his own staff. This is kind of unusual, so tell me about that.

MCS: Well, I spent some time with a prosecutor’s investigator in Moscow for this book. And, uh, he described to me how in fact he gets his, uh, he has his own investigators and they take in detectives from the militia. It’s sort of a split system there. The prosecutor’s a little bit like our District Attorney, and they put a team together for, uh, to investigate different crimes. And they do it partly, the, the person in charge is the investigator and then he has these detectives and you can, um, you can pick or choose your detectives there—who you want to use and who you don’t want to use and quite often you take who you can get because you don’t think you’re going to get anyone better. Arkady, uh, has a typical Russian kind of hand, in that he plays what he’s dealt, to some degree, which is, uh—there’s one detective he would not necessarily want to use, a man named Minin, a Communist of the old school. And then he has Jaak, who’s an Estonian, and probably, uh, not, not a party man at all. And he has Polina, a very forthright pathologist.

DS: She’s great.

MCS: Yeah, I like her. It’s, uh, a funny thing—

DS: Well, she almost takes over the investigation—

MCS: Yes. It’s extraordinary to me. I had a, uh, back in Polar Star, remember the character named Natasha. She started taking over that part of the book. These books are in danger of being hijacked by the women who appear in them. And so Polina does make a bid for power there in the beginning of the book. Anyway, he’s investigating the death of a black market speculator and banker named Rudy Rosen, whose demise we see in the first few pages of the book. And once again he runs into the power lines of Moscow, but these are, these are new power lines.

DS: Well, things, uh, everything has changed, hasn’t it, since the last time? The demise of the Communist government.