Rasputin's Shadow
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- €4.49
Publisher Description
On a cold, bleak day in 1916, a mining pit in Siberia turns into a bloodbath when its miners attack each other, savagely and ferociously. Minutes later, two men - a horrified scientist and Grigory Rasputin, trusted confidant of the tsar - hit a detonator, blowing up the mine to conceal all evidence of the carnage.
In the present day, FBI agent Sean Reilly is tasked with a new, disturbing case. A Russian embassy attaché seems to have committed suicide by jumping out of a fourth-floor window in Queens. The apartment's owners, a retired high school teacher and his wife, have gone missing, while a faceless killer is roaming New York City, leaving a trail of death in his wake.
Joined by Russian FSB agent Larisa Tchoumitcheva, Reilly's investigation into the old man's identity will uncover a deadly search for a mysterious device whose origins reach back in time to the darkest days of the Cold War and to Imperial Russia and which, in the wrong hands, could have a devastating impact on the modern world.
Packed with intrigue and excitement, Rasputin's Shadow will keep readers turning pages long into the night.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the prologue to bestseller Khoury's lively, if conventional, fourth Templar thriller (after 2011's The Devil's Elixir), some Ural Mountain miners go berserk one day in 1916 and start killing each other until an explosion puts them all out of their misery. At the mine entrance, mystic Grigory Rasputin assures his companion, an unnamed man of science, that "we've just ensured the salvation of our people" by blowing up the mine. Flash forward to present-day New York City. FBI special agent Sean Reilly looks into the case of a Russian embassy official who's been thrown to his death from his high-rise apartment building in Queens. Reilly also investigates the disappearance of high school physics teacher Leo Sokolov, a descendant of a member of Rasputin's inner circle of advisers, who has developed a device that uses microwaves to alter human behavior. Reilly sometimes lets his enthusiasm get in the way of his better judgment in this predictable tale of a weapon with world-devastating potential.
