Böcker av Norm Mitchell

By spring 1919 Ukraine, the 'breadbasket of Europe,' has been reduced to a hellscape by the Great War in Europe and the Russian Civil War. Yet there is a new threat: a dangerous and charismatic Red Army commander who, according to reports, is planning to overthrow the new Bolshevik regime in Moscow. Just as Napoleon Bonaparte had done in France more than a hundred years before, this fanatical leader-the Red Napoleon-will start endless bloody wars to make Russia the dominant power in continental Europe. This combat journal of a White Russian cavalry officer records his squadron's search for the renegade with orders to engage and kill him. It culminates in the bloodiest, most significant battle in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War. Yet it is not the end-it is only the beginning of something far more sinister that reaches through the years into France, Turkey, and the United States.

In 1993, arriving in Moscow the day after Mitchell's first novel The Hidden One ended in Paris, Ashley Cooper and his daughter, Annie, continue their quest to become 'Of the Iskandarov'. The setting for the second book in The People of the Blood Trilogy is the newly formed Russian Federation and ends in the wild, magical arctic region, a place scarred and corrupted by Stalinism. Accompanied by the love of his life, Ashley faces dangerous Iskandarov tests in the realm of the demons while searching for his father's gulag diary. The diary contains proof of the so-called 'Iron Cage' and is likely to get Ashley killed. The mystical Iskandarovs are not truly Russian but a once powerful clan from the Caucasus, just now emerging from the shadows of communism.

It is 1993 and Ashley Cooper, in his fiftieth year, loves his work at a prestigious law firm, dealing with post-perestroika Russia. He has it all: a 5th Avenue penthouse overlooking New York's Central Park, membership in all the right clubs, fast cars, and an even faster mistress. But people start dying, including his wife and some close family and friends. With the help of his beloved teenaged daughter, Annie, he begins studying diaries written by his real father and grandfather, which expose the World War Two atrocity of Iron Cage" and the presence of supernatural forces working to hide him from those who would assassinate him. He is the hidden prince, destined to lead the Iskandarov clan into the 21st century, and he must be severely tested by the formidable forces of the Polinkov-the deadly rivals of the Iskanderov for millennia. This is the first novel in a series called People of the Blood.