On a routine and, frankly, boring assignment in Las Vegas, British journalist John Sellars finds himself threatened, chased and shot at. The message is clear: he is being run out of town but why?

One of the truly different foreign-intrigue novels in recent years. This story shuttles between 1915 Russia and 1980 England. A dead man leads the septuagenarian director of a bank founded by the legendary Basil Zaharoff through a multi-layered mystery backward in time to the Russian Revolution, and the author makes it work.