UNTITLED FICTION 2 HB: Fontana

Award-winning Russian historian Catherine Merridale turns her adept hand to fiction in this gripping and poignant thriller set on the eve of Stalin's Great Purge, for readers of Robert Harris and David McCkloskey.

December 1934. Moscow is in ferment after the assassination of one of Stalin's closest aides, leading to a wave of new arrests and summary executions.

Investigator Anton Belkin already thinks he is close to breaking point, when his close friend, the chef Misha Kazakov, is arrested on a trumped-up charge of attempted assassination by poisoning of a senior Moscow official. For Anton the question isn't whether Misha is guilty, but why the secret police want him out of the way.

And with Anton's father, a dissenting artist, attracting attention in all the wrong ways, whether Anton can save Misha without becoming ensnared in the ever-more tangled web of conspiracy around him.