"Do not let yourself be tempted to pursue the Romanov diamonds. They corrupt all who venture close to them." A struggling academic is lured into a perilous quest to find a book lost for ten centuries. The last words of a revolutionary lost in the Bolshevik Terror a hundred years earlier warn him of worse to come. He has become a pawn in a scheme involving a priceless hoard of jewels that vanished following the murder of the Russian royal family. Trapped in a world where nothing is as it seems, he must walk a twisted path between the law and the lawless to learn the secret of the Romanov diamonds.