THE FABERGÉ SECRET

Belfoure’s fourth architectural thriller features his most aristocratic and well-placed architect to date—and the fewest thrills.

Grand Prince Dimitri Sergeyevich Markhov is the best friend of Nicholas II, czar of Russia. Although he’s had many notable commissions, his latest—a request from the czar to design a Tchaikovsky Memorial—is the most high-profile of all, and he throws himself into the project with enthusiasm. In truth, Dimitri’s wife, Princess Lara Pavlovna, offers little distraction since she’s preoccupied with all the bedmates she’s juggling. And Dimitri’s own lover, Dr. Katya Alexandrovna Golitsyn, is an accomplished pianist almost as excited as he is over the Tchaikovsky Memorial. But readers who know anything about Russian history will recognize the troubled currents beneath the surface that Belfoure presents with an air of novel discovery. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904 has cut into the czar’s popularity. So has his police force’s decision to fire on demonstrators agitating for a constitutional monarchy or the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine—a goal Katya’s newly discovered Jewish heritage makes her embrace personally. The court is honeycombed with spies, informants, and traitors. And the public jubilation greeting the birth of Alexis, Czarina Alexandra’s fifth child and first son, is seriously muffled by the royal family’s realization that the czarevich suffers from life-threatening hemophilia, an illness that will eventually (spoiler alert) draw the family into a fatally intimate relationship with the monk Rasputin. No wonder the czar is the target of repeated assassination attempts, one of them involving a creation by peerless jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé. Whatever will become of Dimitri and Katya?

A clotted exposition followed by a news flash: Nicholas fiddles while Russia burns.