ALEX SHAW spent the second half of the 1990s in Kyiv, Ukraine, teaching Drama and running his own business consultancy before being headhunted for a division of Siemens. The next few years saw him doing business for the company across the former USSR, the Middle East, and Africa.
Cold Blood, Cold Black and Cold East are commercially published by HarperCollins (HQ Digital) in English and Luzifer Verlag in German.
Alex, his wife and their two sons divide their time between homes in Kyiv, Ukraine, Worthing, England and Doha, Qatar. Follow Alex on twitter: @alexshawhetman or find him on Facebook.
Cold Blood
Cold Black
Cold East
ALEX SHAW
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Alex Shaw 2018
Alex Shaw asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008306342
Version: 2018-07-26
Table of Contents
To my wife Galia, my sons Alexander and Jonathan,
and our family in England and Ukraine
Donetsk Region, Ukraine
‘I can’t see them yet.’
‘They’ll be here soon, he said so.’ Vitaly Blazhevich peered into the distance towards the besieged city of Donetsk. Smoke rose from tower blocks on the outskirts, the result of early-morning shelling by Russian-supplied Grad rockets. The ceasefire agreement between the Ukrainian government and the Russian-backed insurgent organisations of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LNR) had been in operation for several months, yet attacks continued.