The Siberian dilemma is if you fall in the water, what should you do? If you climb out you will die within 30 seconds because of the cold and if you stay in the water you will die in 5 minutes because of the cold. What to do? Well, the answer is do something. You will die anyway and the doing may well lead to unseen events that may mean you don’t die. So climb out of the water. Well in Arkady Renko’s world doing something always leads to unseen events.

In The Siberian Dilemma, Renko goes searching for his girlfriend who is in Siberia following Mikhail Kutsenov around in order to write an article for the newspaper. She has been gone for a month and hasn’t returned when she said she would. This desire to visit Siberia is then tainted with work when he has to pick up a prisoner and deliver him to a prison, also in Siberia.

When he gets there, strange goings on at the oilfield, a couple of murders and being shot at all mean that he starts to investigate what is going on. In order to help him out, he meets Bolot who calls himself a factotum, someone who does all kinds of work, to help him out. Things get messy and Bolot who knows how to survive in the cold, who is a shaman and who can get things when he needs them turns out to be essential.

This is book nine in the Arkady Renko series and is a world away from book one which was a gritty, realistic look at life in Moscow with Renko as a flawed detective. Here we have bears, magic and love. It’s not quite what the series started out as but I did enjoy it as a break from reading other books. These books are a comfort read for me, easy and quick and I will stay up late at night to finish them!