Alina Adams: Murder on Ice
I think one of the reasons I enjoy Figure Skating so much is that the centerpiece event of any championship – National, International or Olympic – is not the men’s final but the ladies’ final. Women rule in figure skating, and in Alina Adams’ first figure skating mystery, she naturally focuses her attention on the penultimate event, the Ladies’ Final at Worlds. In real life, of course, Michelle Kwan has dominated figure skating for over a decade – in Adam’s novel, a fresh faced American dukes it out with a more cynical Russian, and the final result ends up being a scandal – did the American or the Russian deserve to win? That’s really the central question of the novel, and the judge who gets bumped off is kind of a bonus. If you are a skating fan at all, the whole set up will remind you of the pairs uproar at the last Olympics, where the Canadians were eventually allowed to share a gold medal with the Russian pair.