It's the dawn of the 1990s, and the Soviet Union is crumbling and beginning to haphazardly experiment with capitalism. Jeff Teneson, an impetuous yet struggling American management consultant, thinks he sees an opportunity to travel to Moscow to cut deals, make money and finally prove himself. But as soon as he lands there, Jeff gets caught in a tug of war between two newly-formed and rickety Moscow businesses. One is run by ex-KGB agents who still operate like KGB agents. The other employs two ambitious yet naïve young Russians, Maxim and Natasha, who launch a plot to steal Jeff away from the KGB guys – which turns out to be a dangerous miscalculation. Their situation gets more complicated when Jeff falls for Natasha, and everybody becomes confused about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
The details in the novel about life in Moscow at that time may be hard to believe now, but they are based on the author's observations when he was a journalist covering the dismantling of the Soviet Union. The story is made up, but the facts are true. It was a period of chaos and deprivation, and of uncertainty over what the nation would become. Thugs ran the economy. Boris Yeltsin was a disastrous leader. Anything could happen, and it did – often in quirky and funny ways.
Red Bottom Line will take you on a roller-coaster ride through a strange and unique moment in history.
