Shortly after midnight on July 17, 1918, the imprisoned family of Tsar Nicholas Romanov was awakened and led down to the basement of the Ipatiev house. There they were summarily executed. Their bodies were hidden away, the location a secret of the Soviet state. A decade later, Pekkala, once the most trusted secret agent of the Romanovs, is now Prisoner 4745-P, banished to a forest on the outskirts of humanity. But the state needs Pekkala one last time. His mission: catch the assassins who slaughtered the Romanovs, locate the royal child rumored to be alive, and give Stalin the international coup he craves. Find the bodies, Pekkala is told, and you will find your freedom. In a land of uneasy alliances and lethal treachery, pursuing clues that have eluded everyone, Pekkala is thrust into the past where he once reigned. There he will meet the man who betrayed him and the woman he loved and lost in the fires of rebellion—and uncover a secret so shocking that it will shake to its core the land he loves.  “In the tradition of Martin Cruz Smith and Tom Rob Smith, Sam Eastland pulls us into the culture and politics of Mother Russia. . . . Highly imaginative [and] exciting.”— USA Today “A fantastic premise, frenetic action sequences and a stellar setting would all set apart this debut novel by [Sam] Eastland. . . . What elevates this Russian period thriller . . . is its mad, brilliant hero.”— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A riveting historical thriller with a fascinating protagonist . . . a smart, assured, impeccably researched page-turner.”—David Liss, author of The Devil’s Company   “A triumph! With a canny eye for detail, Eastland re-creates the tragedy of the Romanov dynasty in this intelligent and relentless thriller.”—David Hewson, author of City of Fear   “Gripping and memorable . . . Fans of Russian thrillers (Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44, Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, and David Benioff’s City of Thieves ) will want this.”— Library Journal   “A terrific debut . . . Eastland’s weaving of fact and fiction, of real and invented characters, is brilliantly achieved.”— The Times (London) Sam Eastland lives in the United States and the United Kingdom. He is the grandson of a London police detective who served in Scotland Yard’s famous “Ghost Squad” during the 1940s. He is currently at work on his next Pekkala novel, which Bantam will publish in 2011. The man sat up with a gasp.   He was alone in the forest.   The dream had woken him again.   He pulled aside the old horse blanket. Its cloth was wet with dew.   Climbing stiffly to his feet, he squinted through the morning mist and beams of sunlight angling between the trees. He rolled the blanket and tied the ends together with a piece of rawhide. Then he slipped the roll over his head so that it draped acrosshis chest and back. From his pocket he removed a withered shred of smoked deer meat and ate it slowly, pausing to take in sounds of mice scuffling under the carpet of dead leaves, of birds scolding from the branches above him, and of wind rustling through thetops of the pines.   The man was tall and broad-shouldered, with a straight nose and strong white teeth. His eyes were greenish brown, the irises marked by a strange silvery quality, which people noticed only when he was looking directly at them. Streaks of premature grayran through his long, dark hair, and his beard grew thickly over windburned cheeks.   The man no longer had a name. Now he was known only as Prisoner 4745-P of the Borodok Labor Camp.    Soon he was moving again, passing through a grove of pine trees on gently sloping ground which led down to a stream. He walked with the help of a large stick, whose gnarled root head bristled with square-topped horseshoe nails. The only other thing hecarried was a bucket of red paint. With this, he marked trees to be cut by inmates of the camp, whose function was the harvesting of timber from the forest of Krasnagolyana. Instead of using a brush, the man stirred his fingers in the scarlet paint and daubedhis print upon the trunks. These marks were, for most of the other convicts, the only trace of him they ever saw.   The average life of a tree-marker in the forest of Krasnagolyana was six months. Working alone, with no chance of escape and far from any human contact, these men died from exposure, starvation, and loneliness. Those who became lost, or who fell and brokea leg, were usually eaten by wolves. Tree marking was the only assignment at Borodok said to be worse than a death sentence.    Now in his ninth year of a thirty-year sentence for Crimes Against the State, Prisoner 4745-P had lasted longer than any other marker in the entire Gulag system. Soon after he arrived at Borodok, the director of the camp had sent him into the woods, fearingthat other inmates might learn his true identity.   Provisions were left for him three times a year at the end of a logging road. Kerosene. Cans of meat. Nails. For the res