The history major in me is a fan of Robert Harris. His first book, Fatherland, imagined a world where the Third Reich won World War II. Enigma was a fictional version of the codebreakers based in England during WWII (trying to solve the Enigma machine messages). Archangel is the first of his books, at least that I've read, set in the present.
The main character is an historian who specializes in Soviet era Russian history. While he is at a conference in Moscow he stumbles upon information that he believes that will lead him to a secret notebook that belonged to Stalin. It's almost a Cold War thriller in that there are still a lot of those same elements at work in Russia today. What he eventually finds is much more than a notebook.
The book really captures the spirit of the old saying about those who are doomed to repeat history. And, of course, my all time favorite Faulkner quote: "The past is not dead; it is not even past."
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