This literary thriller is more literary than thrilling but a page turner none the less as one follows the saga of Russo-Scottish naturalist Charlie Doig in the nightmare that was Russia in 1917. Fresh from collecting birds and rare insects in the east, Charlie returns to Russia and his ancestral home in Smolensk when his funds run out and the Imperial Russian Academy no longer pays out the monies it owes.

To his horror, his beloved cousin Elzavita is about to marry a war hero - a union engineered by her impoverished family: his luck seems to turn though when her fiance and her rich uncle [whose heir she is] are assasinated on the eve of the wedding, leaving Charlie to assume the role of bridegroom.

Despite lurking on the country estate, the family is not able to escape events that are transforming Russia: poverty, war losses, injured soldiers, mutinous troops, rebelious peasants, murderous Bolsheviks and, finally, the abdication of the Tsar spell the end of the Romanov Empire they have known and usher in a new and deadly era.

Mere days before their escape to America, Charlie's new bride is gang raped and tortured to death, and his family and friends are murdered horribly by a Bolshevik to whom they had given shelter during the heart of winter: all that is left for him is to take revenge as best he can before leaving Russia forever. Instead though, he gets drunk and revenge has to wait until the sequel, Cold Blood.

A book that is exciting, sad, sexy and brutal in turns, White Blood reads like an authentic early 20th Century Russian work and was not at all what I expected: James Fleming is the nephew of Ian Fleming and - in my opinion - by far the better writer. ( )