(review by Wayne Andres)

I don’t read much fiction but was persuaded by a fellow worker to try this book. It held me spell-bound from beginning to end. The story begins in a mid-western Ameican city with an elderly, wealthy man tape-recording a message for his granddaughter. From there we journey back in time to the days of the last tsar of Russia. The elderly man claims to have been the “kitchen boy” in the house in which the tsar and his family were held captive for several months before being executed. He spins an unbelievable story and then surprisingly kills himself. The final chapters of the book return us to the present. The granddaughter has become his inheritor but is required to journey to Russia to carry out her grandfather’s last request. In St Petersburg she meets an elderly woman who takes her back to her flat and reveals that her grandfather has lied to her. What she tells her next literally made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Have you ever wondered what happened to the two missing Romanov bodies? Read the book!