Russian journalist Leo Krakin pursues an unusual second job in an unlikely time and place--as a private investigator in the Soviet Union of the early 1960s. He takes on a seemingly simple task of finding a professor's missing manuscript that draws him and his girlfriend Anya into a complex plot involving a murder and an audacious Cold War deception regarding weapons of mass destruction. In the course of his investigation, Krakin must deal with the KGB, the Soviet Academy of Science and its director T. D. Lysenko, the Soviet Army, a black market kingpin, a mysterious American agent and a...

This imaginative novel is set in a world dominated by a democratic government obsessed with equality and respect for human rights and indigenous cultures. It follows the lives of a frontiersman who becomes a revered protector of native tribes, an idealistic government leader who is deeply concerned about the treatment of a racial minority of which he is a member, a foreign despot who fiercely defends his homeland's rigid class structure, and others who are destined to play a role in an unexpected threat to that democratic government from outside its borders. Strong characters, political...