ARCHANGEL

ARCHANGEL Robert Harris (Random House, $24.95) In Harris' sensibly lo-fi thriller, Fluke Kelso, a middle-aged scholar of Soviet history at Oxford, finds himself embroiled in the social disarray of modern Russia. When an oilskin volume purportedly containing Stalin's secret notes comes within his reach, Kelso eludes the grasp of historical, police, and political forces, both in seamy Moscow and in the sturdily desolate forests beyond. Harris, whose Fatherland meshed fact and fiction with similarly crisp detail and subtle flair, thankfully eschews melodrama and hyper-aerobic stunts as Kelso staggers toward the momentous truth, leaving us not sweatily out of breath but wearily in the know. A-

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