The Red Coffin. by Sam Eastland Review

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(More customer reviews)"The Red Coffin", the second novel from Sam Eastland, author of "Eye Of THe Red Tzar" is a real disappointment. His earlier novel was excellent, and a great thriller, with sound plotting, strong characters, & a refreshingly new 'hero' in Inspector Pekkala, originally an investigator for Tzar Nicholas, & later of Stalin's Bureau of Special Operations. But where "Eye" was a winner, "The Red Coffin" is the opposite. The storyline is simple (too simple really): Colonel Nagorski, designer of the F-34, thirty-ton super tank, with which Stalin hopes to use to repel any threat from Nazi Germany, is murdered, and Pekkala is assigned to the case. But there are others trying to get hold of Nagorski's tank, & their leader is quite willing to kill for it. So, who killed Nagorski? The problem here is that there are 2 separate crimes & 2 separate villains, and the astute reader will figure out who they are without much effort. In the first, the answer is predictable, having been used by many other authors before Eastland. As for the second, well it's just common sense. And no, I'm not giving anything away by saying so; it really is a no-brainer. What I found really annoying about "The Red Coffin" however, is the incessant flashback's that Pekkala has as the case proceeds, flashback that have absolutely nothing to do with the case. The copy I read had a total of 352 written pages, and of these, 65 were devoted to Pekkala's episodes; that's a staggering 18.47% of the total reading pages in the book. If only Eastland had devoted more of the book to developing his storyline & characters, expanded on the plot somewhat to make it more interesting, and made a greater effort to conceal the identites of the main 2 villains of the piece, at least until the last chapter or two, then "The Red Coffin" could justifiably be called a 'thriller'.

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It is 1939. The world stands on the brink of Armageddon. In the Soviet Union, years of revolution, fear and persecution have left the country unprepared to face the onslaught of Nazi Germany. For the coming battles, Stalin has placed his hopes on a 30-ton steel monster, known to its inventors as the T-34 tank and the 'Red Coffin' to those men who will soon be using it. But the design is not yet complete. And when Colonel Nagorski, the weapon's secretive and eccentric architect, is found murdered, Stalin sends for Pekkala, his most trusted investigator. Stalin is convinced that a sinister group calling itself the White Guild, made up of former soldiers of the Tsar, intend to bring about a German invasion before the Red Coffin is ready. While Soviet engineers struggle to complete the design of the tank, Pekkala must track down the White Guild and expose their plans to propel Germany and Russia into conflict.

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