Flames of Heaven: A Novel of the End of the Soviet Union Peters, Ralph

Moscow, 1991. The Soviet Union is collapsing, and in the chaos, anything is possible — fortunes made overnight, old scores settled, violence erupting in the power vacuum. Ralph Peters drops you into the final days of an empire through multiple perspectives: a ruthless Armenian entrepreneur, an American military officer, a Russian mafia boss, and others caught in the crossfire. Peters, a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer who served in Germany during the Cold War's end, writes with insider knowledge of the era's brutality and moral confusion. The result is a sprawling, unsparing look at what happens when seventy years of order disintegrates in months. If you want the geopolitical thriller Tom Clancy never wrote — grittier, messier, more interested in human wreckage than hardware — this is it.