Day 215 – 52 Books in 52 Weeks

The debut novel Eye of the Red Tsar by Sam Eastland is fantastic. It’s one of those books that I saw at Borders when it just came out a couple of months ago. The title caught my attention since I’ve been reading a lot about the Russian tsars, namely the Romanovs. I picked it up and read the dust jacket: “Introducing Pekkala: he was the Romanovs’ most trusted investigator. Now he’s Stalin’s greatest fear.” That sold it for me.

Pekkala is a detective, with a near-perfect photographic memory, who had been “hired” by Tsar Nicholas II and given complete authority over everyone, even the tsar himself. The story opens with Pekkala in Siberia ten years after the Romanov murders. He’s sent for by Stalin and sent to investigate the most famous murders in Russian history. If he finds the bodies of the Romanovs and their killer, he will be given his freedom.

Eastland takes the reader back and forth in time. We see Pekkala and his brother Anton as boys, then we see how Pekkala met the Tsar and how he ended up in Siberia – all of this woven into the main story of Pekkala’s investigation into the murders and his hunt for the killer.

Though touted to be a suspense novel, I didn’t really find it as such, at least not in the typical meaning of the word. It is, however, a great story of two brothers and how they ended up on opposite sides of the revolution. One working for the Tsar, one working for the communists.

At first I wasn’t sure I’d like the novel since it didn’t describe the murders as they had happened, but the story is so well written, I kept reading. Eastland had done his homework – he knew that Nicholas II refused to have a secretary and was often overwhelmed with paperwork. He knew other such things that really did happen, but he took license to change the real story to fit his tale… and it worked.

And to make sure the reader knew how the real murders happened, at the very end of the book, he wrote up a short 2-3 page section about the murders.

According to the dust jacket, there will be another Pekkala story coming out next year. I can’t wait.