The Gift of the Shah

Strange are the fates of émigrés, bitter is the air of foreign lands, but even scarier is when everything in the world goes awry, and the homeland becomes a prison, comrades-in-arms turn into traitors, and the best girls in the... world spy on those who should have long been taken to the altar. Surgeon Alexander Voronin, a fourth-generation émigré, has long been accustomed to the thought that he is American, not Russian. But it is he who will have to untangle the knot that tightened nearly a hundred years ago, when another Alexander Voronin, his great-grandfather, received from the last of the Persian shahs a devastating and honorable gift – a silver trinket, for which it is permissible to kill, betray, execute…