Book description
Aleksandr made a silent promise to the Lord. God would deliver him
- would deliver Russia - and he would make Russia into the country
that the Almighty wanted it to be. He would be delivered from the
destruction that wasteth at noonday, and from the pestilence that
walketh in darkness - the terror by night...
1825, and Russia has been at peace for a decade. Bonaparte is long
dead and the threat of invasion is no more. For Colonel Aleksei
Ivanovich Danilov, life is calm. The French have been defeated, as
have the twelve monstrous creatures he once fought alongside - and
then against - all those years before. His duty is still to his tsar,
Aleksandr the First, but today the enemy is merely human.
But Aleksandr knows he can never be at peace. He is well
aware of the uprising fomenting within his own army, but his true fear
is of something far more terrible - something that threatens to bring
damnation down upon him, his family and his country. Aleksandr cannot
forget a promise: a promise sealed in blood ... and broken a hundred
years before.
Now the victim of the Romanovs' betrayal has returned to demand what
is his. The knowledge chills Aleksandr's very soul. And for Aleksei,
it seems the vile pestilence that once threatened all he held dear has
returned, thirteen years later...
Born in Worcestershire in 1968, Jasper Kent read Natural Sciences at
Cambridge before embarking on a career as a software consultant. He also
pursues alternative vocations as a composer, musician and now novelist.
The inspiration for his bestselling début,
Twelve
(and the subsequent novels in
The Danilov Quintet
) came from a love of 19th-century Russian literature and darkly
fantastical, groundbreaking novels such as
Frankenstein
and
Dracula
. His researches have taken him across Europe and to Saint Petersburg,
Moscow and the Crimea. He lives in Brighton. To find out more, visit
www. jasperkent. com
