Bequest - A.K. Shevchenko

There's a lot of high praise going around for this book, but for a number of reasons it just doesn't seem justified to me. Primarily and perhaps crucially, it's not all that exciting as an espionage thriller. Bequest is certainly political on a large scale, relating to a race between Ukrainian and Russian agents to find records pertaining to a legendary reserve of Ukrainian Cossack gold deposited in a London bank by Nationalists in keeping for their country when it achieves independence. Additionally the novel takes in different time periods relating to the attempts by various agencies and descendants to recoup the quite extraordinary amount that has been sitting in a London vault for almost 300 years. Even so, there's little initially here to advance the story other than weeding through old documents, legal papers and even diary entries – nothing that is going to provide anything in terms of elements of surprise or tension to keep the reader involved.

What passes for tension in place of any real sense of urgency is incredibly weak – omission and coincidence. The novel opens with Kate identifying the dead body of a recently made friend and colleague, the suggestion being that something special has developed between them, but the novel is coy about revealing identities. That's understandable at this stage of the book, but the author goes to extraordinary lengths in Kate's case to keep her name quite obviously and unrealistically obscure - but to what purpose never becomes entirely clear. English solicitor Kate's Ukrainian surname we are told is frequently misspelled – but there are no examples given of it being spelt wrong – and is skipped over as unpronounceable even by colleagues who have worked with her for years. Meanwhile the author similarly leaves identities ambiguous with a Russian KGB officer charged with investigating the case. It's so patently obvious that it's a set-up for a twist that it fails to generate much in the way of suspense or intrigue, all the more so when it relies on a couple of incredible coincidences.

The other way the novel introduces some dramatic tension into all this is through romance, but it's also done in an unconvincing manner, the two main characters - whose identities have not been fully revealed, but whose relationship has been indicated from the prologue as leading to a tragic ending - getting to know each other through as corny a device as "the deck of cards", relating them to significant people in their lives. It's the death of her new lover then that drives Kate Unpronounceable-whatever-you-call-her to travel to Russia to unravel the mystery of the Cossack gold.

The underlying plot and the gradually revealed aim of the search for the missing millions is not really all that complex an issue, but the structure and the annoyingly contrived writer's devices that attempt to generate tension and suspense make it overly and unnecessarily convoluted. In terms of scale then, Bequest is certainly ambitious and a reasonably good if unexceptional international espionage thriller, but its means of connecting everything together through extraordinary coincidences, conveniently found documentation and an unconvincing mix of romantic, nationalistic and ancestral sentiments aren't really strong enough to make it all hang together.