As soon as I finished Berry's book on the Library of Alexandria, I picked up another of his at the airport in DC. It is amazing how many books you go through when you're traveling two or three or four nights a week. This one was about the search to find heirs of the last Tsa Nicholas II, who was murdered, with his entire family, by the Bolsheviks in July 1918. I really enjoyed this book - it was full of flashbacks and history, and while the artifacts and the search were a bit contrived, I really liked the characters, especially the lead, a black lawyer from the South who's working for a law firm in Russia. The hard part about the book was that he was actually too much in danger the whole book, and I stayed nervous the whole time. Unlike, say a John Grishma book where the protagonist can go underground at least to some extent, this guy is a black man in Russia, and there's no hiding, especially from the Russian mafiya. I wish there had been more character development of his boss, who betrays him, because he was tagged as an unrepentant villain early on. When the book starts with him putting a hit out on his protege - there's not a lot of places you can go from there. A better example might be the pharmaceutical executive in The Codex, who considers himself incapable of having someone killed for business reasons, and even after he does it, won't let himself believe that he did. This guy had no regrets whatsoever, and that made him a bit cardboard.
But I got so intrigued by the story of the final days of the czar that I started reading Massie's Nicholas and Alexandra as soon as I finished this book This book really does put a happy ending on a horrific episode in Russian history. And the details on Russian life and recent history are very interesting.
