About the Book

It was dark now. The moon outside was a thin crescent, shining its light through the doorway and through several holes in the ceiling, cutting through the cave in glowing, ethereal columns. The skin of the dead Russian, lying in one such ray of moonlight, looked as grey as the rocks beside him. Next to the body stood the figure of a man …

1855. After forty years of peace in Europe, war rages. In the Crimea, the city of Sevastopol is under siege. To the north, Saint Petersburg is blockaded. But in Moscow there is one who sits and waits – for the death of a tsar, and for the curse upon his blood to be passed to a new generation.

As their country grows weaker, a man and a woman – unaware of the hidden ties that bind them – must come to terms with their shared legacy.

In Moscow, Tamara Valentinovna Komarova – an agent of the tsar – uncovers a brutal murder. It seems this is not the first death of its kind, but the most recent in a sequence of similar killings committed by one who has stalked the city since 1812.

And in the ruins of Sevastopol, Dmitry Alekseevich Danilov confronts not only the guns of the British and French but also another, unnatural enemy – those creatures his father had thought buried beneath the earth, thirty years before …