Snowdrops by A.D. Miller: book review

Andrew D. Miller’s Snowdrops (2011) is set in Moscow from the early 2000s. The story commences with the smell of a dead body that was buried under the snow all winter, emerging with the spring thaw—"a snowdrop".

Nick Platt is a British lawyer recounting his four-and-a-half years exploring the seedy and decadent nightlife, clubs and bars of Moscow where every woman under forty dresses like a prostitute when the winter snow melts.

Nick sees Maria Kovalenko—Masha to her friends—in a metro station. One stop later, Masha and her sister Katya are accosted by a man in a ponytail trying to steal Masha’s fake Burberry handbag. He scares off the thief and befriends the sisters, eventually helping their aunt Tatiana to find an apartment.

That’s when Nick sees the “snowdrop” surrounded by policemen and knows immediately that it was Konstantin Andreyevich, his neighbour’s missing friend. Nick’s friend, Steve, suggests the death was part of a scam common in Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s. And the sisters were involved.

Simply and sparsely written, the scam is slowly revealed, just as the body is slowly thawing and surfacing from the grey slush to reveal the truth—not just of the sisters, but of the culture of Russian corruption.

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