Book Review:  Murder in Moscow Fiona Figg Mystery #8 by Kelly Oliver @KellyOliverBook @boldwoodbooks

Murder in Moscow
Fiona Figg Mystery #8
by Kelly Oliver

 

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1918 Moscow
Will following her heart mean losing her head? It could mean losing her job.

Fiona Figg trails her nemesis Fredrick Fredricks to Moscow. But when she arrives at the grand Metropol Hotel, the bounder has vanished.

After Fiona doesn’t show up for work at the War Office, Kitty Lane raises a red flag and tracks her to Russia. Seeking haven at the British Embassy, Kitty and Fiona become embroiled in a plot to overthrow the Bolshevik government.

But the plot turns deadly when Fiona goes undercover as a governess in the household of Iron Viktor, the Bolsheviks’ Head of Secret Police. And when Viktor turns up dead in his study, Fiona finds herself wanted for murder and on the lam.

Can Fiona and Kitty find the real killer and escape the Kremlin before it’s too late? Or will this dangerous game of Russian roulette be their last?

My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

She flashed her broken smile again… She smelled like stale onions and weasel.

Even after I’d scrubbed with the perfumed soap, I still smelled the lingering scent of fear.

I looked like a prudish spinster destined to spend the rest of her life reading about romance instead of actually experiencing it.

When she spoke, she sounded like a honeybee buzzing, soft and melodious.

I thought of one of my grandmother’s sayings: Old enough to know better and young enough not to care. I was neither.

 

My Review:

 

This installment of the popular series gave me new respect for the clever Kitty Lane, she is quite resourceful as well as agile. The engaging storylines were active, lushly detailed, unpredictable, and populated with a wide assortment of complex characters and occasional lashings of humorous observations. Ms. Oliver’s devious scheming is far too smart for me. The little pea in my brain was unable to put the various clues together to arrive at any semblance of the end result.

 

Kelly Oliver grew up in the Northwest, Montana, Idaho, and Washington states. Her maternal grandfather was a forest ranger committed to saving the trees, and her paternal grandfather was a logger hell-bent on cutting them down. On both sides, her ancestors were some of the first settlers in Northern Idaho. In her own unlikely story, Kelly went from eating a steady diet of wild game shot by her dad to becoming a vegetarian while studying philosophy and pondering animal minds. Competing with peers who’d come from private schools and posh families “back East,” Kelly’s working-class backwoods grit has served her well. And much to her parent’s surprise, she’s managed to feed and clothe herself as a professional philosopher.

When she’s not writing mysteries, Kelly Oliver is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She earned her B.A. from Gonzaga University and her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She is the author of thirteen scholarly books, ten anthologies, and over 100 articles, including work on campus rape, reproductive technologies, women and the media, film noir, and Alfred Hitchcock. Her work has been translated into seven languages, and she has published an op-ed on loving our pets in The New York Times. She has been interviewed on ABC television news, the Canadian Broadcasting Network, and various radio programs.

Kelly lives in Nashville with her husband, Benigno Trigo, and her furry family, Mischief and Mayhem.