 I have read all of Khoury’s novels and they are usually right up there with the high-energy thrillers of David Baldacci, Steven Berry and James Rollins. This one, for me, however, took a very disappointing nose-dive.
Fundamentally it is about a Russian scientist who developed a fool-proof device utilizing finely-tuned wavelengths, etc. to control people’s minds - to make them raging, murderous lunatics. All done wirelessly, and from a considerable distance. As you can imagine, the possibilities are endless. This device was created in the last years of Tsar Nicholas’ reign right before the Revolution. And from the title, it is obvious that the evil, conniving monk, close personal friend of the Tsar and Tsarina, Grigory Rasputin has something to do with it.
Except, honestly, he really doesn’t. He comes across the creator and the two of them try the primitive device on a busy Siberian mine---and we get a graphic example of how well it works.
That’s it.
Rasputin’s connection to the device is that he was able to use it to help control the Tsarevitch Alexi’s hemophilia. And the point of that is what? We all know what happened to the tsar and his family---and to Rasputin. For me it was an unneeded flimsy historical twist. Rasputin’s presence in the plot was completely unnecessary; a colorful adjunct to the main tale, perhaps. But he really does nothing to bring clarity or even impetus to the story. He finds the creator of the device, uses it for his own needs, and he and the Romanovs die their terrible deaths. The end. None of this echoes into the present, except that the device of course, has been much refined and now works easily from a set-up which can be put in a van and activated with a laptop.
The man who created the device could easily have done what he did without Rasputin as a cohort. Anyone could have been his partner in crime.
And, to complicate things further, Khoury brings in a thread from a previous novel concerning hero FBI agent Sean Reilly’s four-year-old son Alex…that isn’t resolved.
We get one interesting bit of info in the very last pages of the novel…and then it’s left uncompleted, undoubtedly for another book. The novel had too many POV’s including a couple of characters who spoke in first person---which just got very confusing. The plot really needed tightening and focus. The ending was good and pretty darn dramatic. But the story leading up to it was a tangle of too many characters, too many voices and distracting, unnecessary material. ~~ Sue Martin
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