A world on the brink of war, a murder to alter the course of history, ‘A Game of Soldiers’ is a brilliant, atmospheric thriller, perfect for all readers of Fatherland. What if Serbian terrorists had not managed to kill the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo? What if their uprising was fuelled and supported by the new Russian oligarchs? What, if amid all the conspirators running through the chaos of Europe, there were one honest government agent whose determined pursuit of the killer of a child prostitute changed the course of history…? In St Petersburg, beside the glittering court life of the Romanovs, the people are seething. It is not only the Bolsheviks but also the new men, the tycoons grown wealthy in the booming economy and the more vigorous aristocrats who are impatient with the idle, incompetent Romanovs. Pyotr Ryzhkov, probing the murder of a child prostitute, suddenly finds his enquiries deliberately hampered. As the investigation widens, financiers, policemen, government officers, foreign diplomats, even the Minister of Justice, seem to be involved in an ever larger circle of fraud and violence. Then a killing gives him the final clue and leads to the desperate journey to Serbia…