The Russian Passenger
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Written by Gunter Ohnemus and John Brownjohn.
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Editorial Review (from Amazon.com)
"At fifty the good Buddhist takes to the road, leaving all his belongings behind. His sole possession is a begging bowl. That's how it should be. The problem was, there were four million dollars in my begging bowl and the mafia were after me. It was their money. They wanted it back, and they also wanted the girl, the woman who was with me: Sonia Kovalevskaya".
Not only a thriller about murder and big money but also a powerful evocation of the cruel history that binds Russia and Germany.
Gnter Ohnemus, born in 1946, lives in Munich and writes novels, essays and translations. This is his first novel to be translated into English.
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Dale Brayden thinks this book is Good.
The Russian Passenger has the overall form of a classic thriller. A Munich cab driver, Harry Willeman, picks up a Russian woman who has stolen $4 million from the Russian mob. The Russian, Sonia, was the companion of a mob boss and the bookkeeper, and wanted out. The cab driver offers to drive her to Luxembourg. But they are pursued and soon the driver is a target of the mafia, with no way to escape.
But this is a very odd thriller. Harry is 52, and in his life has been involved with three women: an American when he was 16, his wife Ellen when he was in his early 20s, and now, 30 years after his divorce from Ellen, Sonia. In that 30 years he has lived alone, consumed with remorse over a never-quite-specified wrong that he did to Ellen; a wrong that indirectly led to the death of their daughter.
It took about 60 pages for me to warm up to this novel. Partly that was due to a mediocre translation and very poor editing. But finally the novel begins to work, and draws you in to both the chase story and the gradual revelations about Harry's life.