Book Review: Eye of the Red Tsar

Eye of the Red Tsar
Sam Eastland
Faber and Faber
£12.99 335pp

Who killed the last Tsar? Answering that question could save the life of Inspector Pekkala once the Emerald Eye, Russia’s most famous detective and an intimate of the royal family, now just another prisoner in Stalin’s infamous gulag.

The fate of the Romanovs has been the subject of several novels of which Sam Eastland’s is one of the best. In it he tells the story of Pekkala’s hunt, on the orders of Stalin himself, for the man who carried out their brutal execution in 1917 combined with that of his relationship with the Tsar and his experiences during the aftermath of the revolution.

Eastland believably recreates life in Stalinist Russia with its unique mix of bureaucracy and terror and provides a plot that moves from the gulag to the bleak abandoned mine where the Tsar’s body and those of his family were disposed of by their executioners with breakneck pace and contains a tragic double twist at its end.

In Inspector Pekkala Eastland has created a character a detailed back story and sufficient depth to sustain the series of which Eye of the Red Tsar is the first instalment, if the books that follow are up to its high standard the loyal readership he is sure to attract are in for a treat.