Red Mistress: A Novel

Red Herring. This book seemed so real that I was constantly Googling to see if various people were in fact real. Only to get to the author's note at the end where Blackwell points out that at least a few characters were based on real life people - but the characters did not share the names of the people they were based on. From the opening opulence of Tsarist Russia just prior to WWI to the Bolshevik Revolution to the dramas of the new Political Directorate and Stalin's purges, this book spans about 25 years of momentous history and covers it in a way I had never really seen before. Great work in making every setting believable and almost palpable, and great storytelling within those settings to boot. Very much recommended.