The White Russian
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3.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
St Petersburg 1917. The capital of the glittering Empire of the Tsars and a city on the brink of revolution where the jackals of the Secret Police intrigue for their own survival as their aristocratic masters indulge in one last, desperate round of hedonism.
For Sandro Ruzsky, Chief Investigator of the city police, even this decaying world provides the opportunity for a new beginning. Banished to Siberia for four years for pursuing a case his superiors would rather he'd quietly buried, Ruzsky finds himself investigating the murders of a young couple out on the ice of the frozen river Neva.
The dead girl was a nanny at the Imperial Palace, the man an American from Chicago and, if the brutality of their deaths seems an allegory for the times, Ruzsky finds that, at every turn, the investigation leads dangerously close to home. At the heart of the case, lies Maria, the beautiful ballerina Ruzsky once loved and lost. But is she a willing participant in what appears to be a dangerous conspiracy or likely to be it's next, perhaps last, victim?
In a city at war with itself, and pitted against a ruthless murderer who relishes taunting him, Ruzsky finds himself at last face to face with his own past as he fights to save everything he cares for, before the world into which he was born goes up in flames.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bradby's historical mystery, his second novel after The Master of Rain, begins in January 1917, when the bodies of a man and a woman are found on the ice of the Neva River outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. On the case is Sandro Ruzsky, chief investigator of the St. Petersburg police, fresh from a three-year exile in Siberia for unwittingly and indirectly causing the death of a secret police informant. He discovers that the victims were an American bank robber and an Imperial nanny, and traces them both to a circle of Yalta revolutionaries. Or are they actually double agents, financed by the czar's secret police? Ruzsky and his mistress, a renowned and glamorous ballerina, gallop across the snows between St. Petersburg and Yalta in pursuit of the killer. In the meantime, two new bodies show up. There is as much royal family intrigue as there is politics, and in a final twist, Ruzsky is stunned to find one of his own loved ones involved. The idea of setting a murder mystery on the eve of the Russian revolution is terrific, and Bradby ably captures the urban lawlessness, food shortages, unrest and Imperial decadence that characterize the period. The writing is a bit overdramatic (" 'Hello, my wounded soldier,' she said. She turned around gently and placed her moist, warm mouth against his. She arched her back, a palm against his cheek. 'No one has ever loved you before, have they, Sandro?' ") but then, so were the times.
