Will I love The Tiger?

This excellent book reads like a mashup of animal non-fiction, true crime, and horror.

Set in a remote part of Russia, it recounts the hunt for a man-eating tiger that slowly begins to feel like a murder case where the killer methodically selected and stalked the victim.

The cunning and menace of the Amur (Siberian) tiger at the center of the hunt was so far beyond what I expected I found myself rooting for the tiger while at the same time worrying about the hunters on their seemingly doomed search. I won’t give the ending away, but it was shocking. … show more.

This is a lovely book about a Siberian Tiger that stocked and killed hunters who had been hunting tigers. Vaillant situates this fascinating story into the collapse of the Soviet Union. People on the far eastern edge of Russian Siberia, the Amur River area, were desperate to survive as the economy collapsed.

At the same time, China is taking off, and the affluent will buy tiger parts at great cost to increase their sexual stamina. Thus, desperate Russian hunters arrive. Vaillant does a great job following a game warden as he tries to solve the crime of a tiger seemingly… show more.

This non-fiction book takes you to a distant place in what feels like a distant time: the Russian Far East region of Primorski Krai on the Pacific, a giant forest on the Pacific that used to be a part of China and full of huge Siberian tigers, but at the time of the book – the period of collapse following Glasnost – is full of rather down-at-heel poachers and loggers, policed by a small but dedicated team of conservationists.

When one of the poachers wounds a tiger, it tracks him down – apparently as revenge – and eats him, then… show more.