Untitled Miller

Untitled Miller Synopsis

Intelligent thriller set against the backdrop of Tsarist Russia.

The world is in turmoil; the nations are exhausted by war but are engaged in one more struggle to overturn a feared, revolutionary regime. That revolutionary regime is itself struggling to find its way, to learn how to govern, to know whom to trust. There is one bargaining chip - valuable but dangerous and all parties are dancing around it, negotiating for it.

Pyotr Ryzhkov, one-time senior member of the Tsar's secret police, was working for the French in Moscow but has been 'persuaded' to carry out a mission for a part of the Bolshevik government. His mission is to plunge into the midst of the civil war raging in the south of Russia, with the Allies uniting with the Cossacks and dissident Russians to fight against the Red Army - and to locate the bargaining chip, the Russian royal family and bring them back to Moscow under the Kremlin's control.

In the distant regions of the Urals where the Romanovs have been hidden, there are foreign agents armed with gold and guns, some Bolsheviks determined to sell to the highest bidder to save their struggling regime, local soviets determined to kill the oppressors, and security officers, like Pyotr, sent by various Moscow offices, to gain control, none of them knowing about the other. As Pyotr arrives, he hears the anoucement that the family are dead but there are no witnesses, no bodies.

This is a remarkable novel of the hardships of those caught in the middle of such conflict; An atmospheric, clever, historical thriller from the author of A Game of Soldiers, it brilliantly depicts a crisis very similar to contemporary ones, which gives an entirely new twist the famous Romanov story.