This multidimensional novel explores the diamond industry and its relation to the world diamond cartel; it explores the relation of an independent Siberia to Moscow, and it explores the corruption of present day Russia.

Clothed within the suspense plot is a political commentary of Russia today. In a world that is accustomed to mortgaging the future to pay for the past, The Ice Curtain goes one step deeper into the hopeless morass, wherein the future is mortgaged to merely sustain life in the present…painting an even bleaker picture.

Russia has climbed to the rank of the second largest diamond producer in the world, and the mine at Mirny, Siberia is one of the reasons. The story opens as some of the miners are striking. Not for better pay, but to merely be paid. The strikers are quickly punished by immediate death and the story fast forwards a month to a trip to Moscow being made by Siberian Delegate Arkady Volsky and his assistant George Nowek.

Volsky owes his job to President Yeltsin because he had been one of the moving forces in the labor union which helped vault Yeltsin to power. Nowek is a friend of long standing and, as the better educated one, serves his superior well with information and analysis. They are going to Moscow to meet with Petrov, the chairman of the State Diamond Committee. Volsky has made a promise to the miners that he will return with money for their back pay, and he is a man known never to fail to make delivery on a promise.

Mirny has shipped four million carats of diamonds to Moscow to be sold to the diamond cartel, and the miners have not been paid for their labor. Petrov is the man who must bear the responsibility for stalling the negotiations with the cartel. So Volsky’s plan is if Petrov refuses to meet his demands for miner’s salaries, he will merely go over his head to Yeltsin.

Nowek is late and barely misses the meeting with Petrov. Nowek does arrive at the meeting place in time to see Volsky executed on the street and manages to be arrested himself for the crime. Because Volsky was a dignitary of some note, the Federal Security Bureau, successor to the KGB, is investigating in the person of Major Levin.

This novel is aptly named; it is totally permeated with a cold, bleak and stark reality.

--Thea Davis