Stumbling through Petrovsky Park one cold morning in search of firewood, an elderly woman makes a horrifying discovery. A burly peasant twirls in the wind, hanging from a bowed tree by a rope about his neck, a bloody axe tucked into his belt. Nearby, packed neatly into a suitcase, is the body of a dwarf, a deep axe wound splitting his skull in two.
It does not take long for the noted police investigator Porfiry Petrovich, still drained from his work on the case involving the deranged student Raskolnikov, to suspect that the truth of the matter is more complex that the crime scene might suggest. Why do so many roads lead to the same house of prostitution and the same ring or pornographers? Why do so many powerful interests seem intent on blocking his efforts? His investigation leads him from the squalid tenements, brothels, and drinking dens of the city's Haymarket district to an altogether more genteel stratum of society. As he gets deeper and deeper in, and the connections between the two spheres begin to multiply, both his anger and his terror mount.
Atmospheric and tense from its dramatic opening to its shocking climax, The Gentle Axe is a spellbinding historical crime novel, a book that explores the darkest places of the human heart with tremendous energy, empathy, and wit. As lucky as St. Petersburg residents are to have Porfiry Petrovich in public service, we are equally fortunate to have R.N. Morris on hand to chronicle his most challenging case to date.
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"R.N. Morris picks up the career of Porfiry Petrovich, the man who tormented, and then drew a confession from, the Piter student Raskolnikov in Fyodor Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment'. Taking on such a colossus of literature as Dostoevsky - willfully walking into his shadow - is the sort of mad act one would expect from one of his characters; Morris has succeeded. The descriptions with which the author builds 'The Gentle Axe', similar enough to Dostoevsky's to retain continuity, are deliberately distinctive enough that imitation is clearly not what Morris had in mind. Likewise, the characters, carrying Dostoevsky's compound of the defiant hopelessness inflicted by poverty while still being individual to Morris, who fleshes out the lives of the former's peripheral names while successfully introducing new faces, worthy of such a story. Porfiry Petrovich himself is alive with all of the foibles - the detective's games, the self-doubt - while all around him carries sufficient freshness to pair this book with the original while not anchoring itself to 'Crime...'.
Fans of the minutiae of Dostoevsky's work may pick Morris' work apart, but I think they are missing the point. This book is not a continuation of 'Crime and Punishment', but an individual attempt to branch away from Raskolnikov's life, remain in 1860s St Petersburg, and run with a new concept loosely linked to previous work. See it this way and Morris has created a very good story from a thin sliver of history. In short, murder has been committed in a Russia grappling with a stuttering industrialisation and the Emancipation of the Serfs, and nobody can conceive of a man better qualified to entertain with its investigation than Porfiry Petrovich."
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Mike (5 out of 5 stars)