About Last to Fold

The past is catching up with Gulag-born, KGB-trained Turbo Vlost.  His ex-wife wants him dead, the Russian mob has similar aims, and his former KGB colleagues are willing to eliminate anyone who gets close to the lethal conspiracy they thought they buried back in 1999.

Turbo was born in the Gulag and spent 20 years in the KGB (thanks to a facility for languages), much of that spying on the United States.  He has yet to come to terms with the shame of his Gulag past—“the complicit victim, Stalin’s most enduring legacy,” as he puts it—which has already led to the vicious disintegration of his marriage and banishment from his only son.  He has also been forced to sever ties with the man who rescued him from the camps, guided his KGB career, and served as the only father he’s ever known. 

Turbo has exiled himself to New York, but the past is catching up.  Hired to deal with an apparent kidnapping, he finds his client—a predatory banker—married to his ex-wife, whom he has not seen in 20 years, and who’s living under a stolen identity and quite possibly engaged in the kidnapping scheme herself.  As he tries to unravel that anomaly, he discovers more threatening mysteries—a high-tech money laundry the Russian mob is determined to protect, and a plot to cover-up KGB orchestration of the 1999 bombings of four apartment buildings that killed 300 people, ignited the second Chechen War and propelled Putin to the presidency.  He’s drawn back into the world of his old KGB colleagues, including the surrogate father, whose current motives are much too opaque, and the father’s natural son, a mobster, whose hostility is all too clear.

Last to Fold  is a new take on the classic American detective stories of Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald, set in the tech-driven, globalized twenty-first century and told with a twist—by a new voice on the American detective fiction scene.  He's independent, tough, funny, fatalistic, with a keen sense of irony and his own definitions of right, wrong, fate and justice, all shaped by his past.