WHISKEY PRIEST

by Alexander J. Motyl

Themes of identity, faith, and redemption combine as a disillusioned KGB assassin and an insecure female U.S. diplomat track down an Ivy League professor running a prostitution ring in Ukraine. Anatoly Filatov is the "whiskey priest," a despairing Communist true believer, whose world comes crashing down with the collapse of the USSR. Jane Sweet is the foreign-service officer, a Ukrainian-American woman who discovers her identity, as both a woman and a Ukrainian, while liberating herself from her past. The action heats up as Filatov, who is a part-time hit man for the Russian Mafia, kills three American professors in Vienna. The fourth, a cynical Ivy League professor and Soviet emigre, Igor Bazarov, escapes to Kiev. The four professors stole millions of dollars from the Mafia and invested in a prostitution ring that exploits Ukrainian women.

Filatov and Sweet pursue Bazarov throughout Ukraine, and, along the way, Filatov seduces Sweet. As the two close in on Bazarov, Sweet realizes she has been used--and plots revenge in a stunning conclusion.

Genres: Fiction

148 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2005

About the author

Alexander J. Motyl (Олександр Мотиль) is professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark, as well as a writer and painter. He served as associate director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University from 1992 to 1998. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, he is the author of several political science books and articles.

Nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2008 and 2013, he is the author of six novels, Whiskey Priest, Who Killed Andrei Warhol, Flippancy, The Jew Who Was Ukrainian, My Orchidia, and The Taste of Snow.

He has done performances of his fiction and poetry at the Cornelia Street Café and the Bowery Poetry Club. Motyl’s artwork has been exhibited in solo and group shows in NYC, Philadelphia, and Toronto and is on display on the Internet gallery, www.artsicle.com. He teaches at Rutgers University-Newark and lives in NYC.

Reviews

[Nestor Rychtyckyj · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fairly short book (less than 150 pages) bur manages to squeeze a lot into it. On one level it's a crime thriller where we follow an ex-KGB assasin who is now working for the Russsian mafia and chasing down a quartet of academics who have stolen money from his employer. On the way, he becomes involved with an American diplomat is assigned to find out what has happened to this professor. At another level, this book is a synopsis on how people have survived and adapted with the many changes that the collapse of the Soviet Union has forced upon them. The KGB assasin cannot understand a world where communism cannot exist and the AMerican diplmat turns out to be a child of Ukranian nationalist who fled to the USA after World War II precisely becuase of their hatred of communism. Through a series of flashbacks both of these characters and their motives are brought to the surface until they finally clash.

The book is fascinating to me as my background is very simliar to the diplomat in the story; I definitely recommend ir to anybody who is interested about life in an independent Ukraine and how we in the Ukrainain diapore view Ukraine now. There's plenty of action in the book and my only minor compalimt is tha the flashbacks are a little too frequent and interrupt the present-day story a little too much.

[Michael Sanderson-green · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book for a lot of reasons mostly for how much was in such a short novel the other for giving some insight into the Russian/ukranian relationship. Th only downside was the crap quality of the amazon E book the tabs were all over the place, spelling mistakes and weird symbols for quotation marks and commas , yes it was only $3 but if I was the author I'd be pissed off.