Axel of Evil

Axel of Evil is Alina Adams's 2005 third Figure Skating Mystery, sending Bex Levy and the 24/7 Sports network television production team to Moscow for a senior international competition where one of the male singles favorites is murdered between the short program and the free skate. The combination of international skating politics and post-Soviet Moscow procedural is what gives the book its texture.

Adams continues to mine the figure-skating-television-production world for genuinely fresh procedural material. The Moscow setting is the strongest in the series to that point (Adams's father worked as a Russian-language journalist and translator and the post-Soviet detail is sourced). The Bex Levy character is more confident here than in the first two entries, and the supporting cast (the network executive producer, the legendary commentator, the Russian federation officials) is fully realized. The mystery is fair-play.

Recommended for Figure Skating Mystery readers, for fans of sports-procedural mysteries with international settings (Dick Francis, Andrew Vachss's Burke novels in their international stretches), and for readers looking for books like Axel of Evil in the very narrow figure-skating-mystery genre. Four solid stars.