In the new St. Petersburg everyone is driven: by hunger, by fear, by greed. The state shops are empty and among struggling private enterprise organised crime is flourishing. An investigator from Moscow is sent by the overstretched militia to learn more about the burgeoning Russian mafia. No one knows more about the subject than detective Yevgeni Ivanovich Grushko: determined and laconic, he pursues the mafia with a single-mindedness verging on obsession. A Molotov cocktail is thrown through the window of a fancy restaurant. Grushko is suspicious when he finds its cold room stacked high with prime cuts of meat. Mikhail Milyukin, a prominent wound in the back of his head. In the boot lies a Georgian gangster, his mouth shot to pieces in gruesome admonition. As Grushko investigates Milyukin’s murder, a bloody and brutal war breaks out between the gangster factions, but this does not explain all the loose threads. Why had the Department tapped Milyukin’s phone? Why had Milyukin tried to hire a bodyguard two days before his death? Why was a pimp, whom Milyukin had helped put in the zone, let out after serving only half his sentence, and why was Milyukin’s widow holding out on them? As Grushko and the investigator unravel a tangled web of deviousness and brutality, they reveal a truth which is far more disturbing than anything they had imagined, and whose consequences threaten even Grushko’s own family. Dead Meat, Philip Kerr’s gripping and tense new thriller, gives a fascinating insight into the dark side of life in the new Russia