Riocard Riordon-Kelly grew up in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland, where an early fascination with the darker currents of modern history sent him deep into the archives of post-Soviet transition - the extraordinary decade in which the world's largest empire dissolved and left behind nations, economies, and human lives in conditions of acute precariousness. His particular interest lies in the criminological history of the former Soviet space: the way that institutional collapse, narcotics economies, and social disruption combined to produce forms of criminal organization that no existing framework had been built to understand. He lives between Ireland and Central Europe and has spent years researching the specific conditions of Kazakhstan's transition decade. Borman is his most forensically demanding work to date.