London: Bantam Press, (2003) dj. SIGNED hardcover first edition - The author's fourth novel set in St. Petersburg, 1917, in a country at war, losing on the battlefield and starving at home "the glittering capital of the Tsarist empire and a city on the brink of revolution - where the jackals of the secret police maneuver for their own survival and their aristocratic masters indulge in one final moment of hedonism." Sandro Ruzsky, chief investigator of the St. Petersburg police department, has just returned from a three-year banishment to Siberia, only to be welcomed back to the city of his birth by the discoveryof a young couple brutally murdered and found on the ice of the frozen river Neva just outside the Tsars Winter Palace. SIGNED on the title page. 445 pp plus author's note. ISBN: 0-593050886.