Super-villain Vladimir Kalinin…
He’s back! He’s a psycho; a power-hungry, greedy devil; and a bad-ass villain who sometimes manages to do some good. That more or less sums up his appearance in Leonardo and the Quantum Code, Book Five of the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series.
I needed a foil for both Janos Rakoczy, Hungarian assassin extraordinaire and the true villain in that tale; and Esther Brookstone, ex-MI6 spy and ex-Scotland Yard inspector, who’s the saucy main character. And there he was, waiting in the wings, smiling like the Cheshire cat, who also alternates between visibility and invisibility. (Alice and her friends are even mentioned a few times in the novel because Esther’s second husband and close friends from her Oxford days are also featured; Alice’s stories started in Oxford!)
Kalinin’s appearance in this novel is logical: He’s at the beginning of my fictional timeline in The Midas Bomb and goes all the way to Soldiers of God, the bridge book between “The Clones & Mutants Trilogy” and “The Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” In fact, his actions have an influence on everything on that timeline even beyond Soldiers of God! He appears off and on in the various novels, this Cheshire cat, throughout the “Detectives Chen & Castilblanco” series and dominating the “Clones & Mutants Trilogy.” He even appears in The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan and the novella “The Phantom Harvester” (available as a free PDF download—see my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page).
At the end of Gaia and the Goliaths (#7 in the detective series), you already saw some of his DIY skills, even though his constant companion, old Irish bombmaker Sean Cassidy, is often there to help. (He might have been unstoppable if he’d had more people like Sean; too many he hired failed him.) But we also learn more abut his hatred for the Russian leaders who made him flee his homeland, including Putin.
He shows some good human qualities in No Amber Waves of Grain (#3 in the “Clones & Mutants Trilogy”), and there are many glimpses of this in manty of the stories where he appears (I still love that rose scene at the end of The Midas Bomb). I’ve never appreciated cardboard-like two-dimensional characters in my reading—most human beings are complex—so I try to make my characters truly human in all my stories I write (ETs are an exception, of course). Because Kalinin appears so often in them, readers can see that in spades with him.
Kalinin is a survivor and self-made man. He’s suave, sophisticated, and very lethal .He’s the James Bond of villains. I hope you enjoy seeing him in action once again in Leonardo and the Quantum Code.
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Comments are always welcome.
“Esther Brookstone Art Detective.” Binge-reading plus a treasure hunt: What’s not to like? Esther Brookstone takes you around merry olde England, Europe, the Middle East, and South America in her five-book series that also travels through three publishers. You start with saucy Esther, an ex-MI6 spy and Scotland Yard inspector, and her paramour Bastiann van Coevorden, an Interpol agent; you move on to their exciting honeymoon cruise on the Danube; and you then return to Esther’s home turf where the old married couple’s adventures continue. The two sleuths are 21st-century versions of Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Esther’s novels can be found wherever quality ebooks are sold. (Palettes, Patriots, and Prats and Leonardo and the Quantum Code are recent additions to this series, and the last two are not on Amazon.)
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
