MOSCOW 1987: With Gorbachev’s Soviet Union in a state of flux and uncertainty, Londoner Norman ‘Nobby’ Robert Jackson — amateur Classicist, fluent Russian-speaker, business consultant and blackmarketeer living comfortably in Moscow with two mistresses — is approached by a fellow British businessman to locate the ‘Apsheron icon’. All is not what it seems, however. Next day ‘Nobby’ discovers the man brutally bludgeoned to death in his hotel room. Who has killed him, and why? Pursued to Yalta with his mistresses, he finds he has become the target for a killer. Determined to find those responsible for a series of brutal murders of friends and associates attending a British trade exhibition in Moscow, ‘Nobby’ finds his quest entangling him with Major Shcheglov of the Moscow Police, Grigori Vladimirovitch of the KGB, and George Trenden, head of the SIS’s Soviet Desk, taking him from Yalta to Moscow, London and Devon and back to Moscow again on the trail of a mysterious and powerful international cabal conspiring to change the course of history.

BARRY JONES, Moscow’s own Arthur Dailey, was a scholar, raconteur and Mr Fix-it, well known for his ability to arrange almost anything in the city that he made his home town from 1976 until his expulsion — in chains — from the Russian Federation in 1998. MOSCOW AIN’T SUCH A BAD PLACE, the first of his ‘Moscow’ novels, is a compelling story peopled by fascinating characters, and provides a sympathetic and unique insight into the people and pattern of daily life in Moscow during the heady days of glasnost, perestroika, and the dramatic buildup to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.