In a desolate Russian penal colony, the radio blares the news of President Kennedy’s death. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vasin’s new post as director of a gulag camp in the middle of a frozen tundra is far from a promotion. This is where disgraced agents, like Vasin, are sent to disappear and die quietly. But when tensions in the camp mount and a violent revolt breaks out, Vasin finds himself on the run with a mysterious prisoner holding the most dangerous secret in the world: who ordered the murder of President Kennedy. In a breathless chase that leads them throughout the Soviet Union, Vasin must stay one step ahead of the deadliest spy and police organizations in the world, and keep the most wanted man in Russia alive.

The year is 1962, and KGB Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vasin is chasing a white elephant: the long-rumored existence of an American spy embedded at the highest echelon of Soviet power. In a wild-goose chase that has Vasin engaged in high-stakes espionage against a rival State agency, he first hears whispers of an ominous top-secret undertaking: Operation Anadyr. As tensions flare between Nikita Khrushchev and President Kennedy over Russian missiles hidden in Cuba, four Soviet submarines are ordered to make a covert run at the American blockade in the Caribbean --- each sub carrying tactical ballistic missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads.

In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world. Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.

Richard Sorge moved in a world of shifting alliances and infinite possibility. Born to a German mother and a Russian father, Sorge became a fanatical communist --- and the Soviet Union's most formidable spy. Like many great spies, Sorge was an effortless seducer, combining charm with a ruthless manipulation. He did not have to go snooping to find out closely guarded state secrets --- his victims willingly shared them. Hiding in plain sight as a foreign correspondent, he infiltrated and influenced the highest echelons of German, Chinese and Japanese society in the years leading up to and including World War II. His intelligence proved pivotal to the Soviet counteroffensive in the Battle of Moscow, which determined the outcome of the war.

The Russian Empire once extended deep into America: in 1818, Russia’s furthest outposts were in California and Hawaii. The dreamer behind this great Imperial vision was Nikolai Rezanov, whose quest to plant Russian colonies from Siberia to California led him to San Francisco, where he was captivated by Conchita, the 15-year-old daughter of the Spanish Governor. Owen Matthews conjures a brilliantly original portrait of one of Russia’s most eccentric Empire-builders.