Vodka Neat

"The dead twins stole my chicken!"

That's the least of the revelations to greet Faith Zanetti on her return to Moscow, a city she last lived in some fifteen years ago. A lot has changed since then—no more Soviet Union, for one thing—but a lot hasn't. The dead-eyed thugs who arrest Faith before she's had time to unpack may no longer call themselves KGB, but they dance to that old familiar music. And while Faith is now a (semi) respectable journalist, rather than the tear-away teen bride of a Russian bootlegger, she's about to learn a lesson that the Russians themselves have known all along: the past is never so deeply buried that it can't reach out and bite you in the back.