Eye of the Red Tsar-Sam Eastland

Eye of the Red Tsar
Sam Eastland
Bantam, Apr 27 2010, $25.00
ISBN: 9780553807813

Before the Revolution in two steps, Tsar Nicholas Romanov trusted his brilliant Finnish born investigator Pekkala to solve impossible cases. However, in the Summer of 1917, the great detective became Prisoner 4745-P exiled to spend the rest of his life for crimes against the state in the harshest Siberian gulag.

Surviving in his icy forest more as a wily beast over the next decade, he remains with no hope of either going home to Finland or St. Petersburg. However in 1929, Stalin orders the Tsar’s “Emerald Eye” brought to Moscow to investigate the murders of the Romanovs in Ekaterinburg. The Communist leaders wants to know who killed the Tsar and his family; who survived if any; and what happened to the Tsarist treasure?

Although a super investigative frozen case, the story line is in many ways a wonderful historical thriller as the audience learns plenty of what happened to the Tsarist family, the hero’s back-story in Finland and on the train to Russia, and the salad days of Stalin’s rule. Fast-paced throughout, readers will appreciate this fine tale as every Russian who knows anything understands the need to remain mute as death by assassination is better than the one way ticket to the gulag.

Harriet Klausner