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1914...a world on the brink of war, a murder to alter the course of history. What if Serbian terrorists had not managed to kill the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo?

One man, one secret society, one royal assassination and a world on the brink of war. In St Petersburg, beside the glittering court facade, the people are seething. It is not only the Bolsheviks but also the new men, the tycoons grown wealthy in the booming economy, who are impatient with their idle and incompetent rulers.

Pyotr Ryzhkov, a government agent, is used to keeping his head down and minding his own business. But the immediate cover-up of the death of a child-prostitute, which he happens to witness, drives him to probe into what he s sure is murder.

As the investigation widens, financiers, policemen, other government officials, foreign diplomats and even the Minister for Justice, seem to be involved in an ever increasing circle of fraud and violence, culminating in that incident in Sarajevo that was to change the world.

A Game of Soldiers is a rare historical thriller, with new insights into well known events, a vivid sense of time and place, and a dramatic narrative in an atmosphere of impending doom.

An engrossing thriller... a narrative full of incident, character, and period detail. You won't want to put this book down. - Peter Robinson

Stephen Miller was born in the USA and now lives in Canada. After graduating from Virginia Military Institute in 1968, he moved to Vancouver to concentrate on creative writing and theatre, starting as a stage carpenter and working his way up to becoming an actor and scriptwriter. A Game of Soldiers is his first novel.