To Kill a Tsar
This tense, gripping novel set in 19C St Petersburg amid desperate revolutionaries bent on the overthrow of the Tsar 'confirms Andrew William's place in the front ranks of English thriller writers' (Daily Mail). Shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters and the Walter Scott Awards, To Kill a Tsar will appeal to readers of John le Carre, Robert Harris and Alan Furst.
St Petersburg, 1879. A shot rings out in Palace Square. Cossack guards tackle the would-be assassin to the ground. In the mêlée no one notices a striking dark haired young woman in a heavy coat slip away from the scene.
Russia is alive with revolutionaries. While Tsar Alexander II remains a virtual prisoner in his own palaces, his ruthless secret police will stop at nothing to unmask those who plot his assassination and the overthrow of the Imperial regime. For Dr Frederick Hadfield, whose medical practice is dependent on the Anglo-Russian gentry, these are dangerous times. Drawn into a desperate cat-and-mouse game of undercover assignations, plot and counter-plot, he risks all in a perilous double life.
From glittering ballrooms to the cruel cells of the House of Preliminary Detention, from the grandeur of the British Embassy to the underground presses of the young revolutionaries, To Kill a Tsar is a gripping thriller set in a world of brutal contrasts in which treachery is everywhere and nothing is what it seems.
Readers also enjoyed
Andrew Williams
Born Sheffield in 62, brought up in Lincolnshire, after studying English at Oxford I worked for ten years as a senior current affairs producer with the BBC, covering the big international stories of the day. My programme on the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995 was shortlisted for an Emmy and used in evidence at the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. For the next ten years, I wrote and directed historical documentaries for the BBC and international co-producers, including an award winning series, ‘The Battle of the Atlantic’, and I wrote a couple of bestselling accounts of Second World War campaigns, ‘The Battle of the Atlantic’, and ‘D-Day to Berlin’, to accompany TV productions of the same name. My first novel, The Interrogator, was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Thriller of the Year Award and the Ellis Peters Historical Fiction Award, and it was The Daily Mail’s debut thriller of 2009. The second, To Kill A Tsar, was one of The Mail’s thrillers of 2010 and was shortlisted for The Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Ellis Peters Award. My 1960’s espionage thriller, Witchfinder, was one of The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year. The Daily Mail was decent enough to describe me as ‘as one of Britain’s most accomplished thriller writers’, and The Times Literary Supplement noted that ‘if le Carré needs a successor, Williams has all the equipment for the role.’ Very gratifying. But as you can imagine from the above, getting the history right is especially important to me: history thrillers are my thing!
More books by Andrew Williams
