It's a good question--such a good question that you won't likely find an answer here. Better to go visit WhatIsCity512 (Rasputinsbastards.com) the website launched today to offer some tidbits and morsels concerning my upcoming novel Rasputin's Bastards.
You've seen the cover on this blog before. The new website, which you can go straight to by clicking here--offers up video and documents and news clippings with an eye to if not answering then raising a lot of questions about the mysterious Russian city nestled somewhere in the Urals, where so far as anyone knows, nothing ever happened.
Yeah, of course stuff happened there. Bad stuff. But you won't find out about any of that by hanging around here. Go check out the site, which was put together by Laura Marshall, one of the many geniuses over at ChiZine Publications.
The book itself comes out at the end of June. Here's what it'll say on the back cover:
From a hidden city deep in the Ural mountains, they walked the world
as the coldest of Cold Warriors, under the command of the Kremlin and
under the power of their own expansive minds. They slipped into the
minds of Russia’s enemies with diabolical ease, and drove their human
puppets to murder, and worse. They moved as Gods. And as Gods, they
might have remade the world. But like the mad holy man Rasputin, who
destroyed Russia through his own powerful influence . . . in the end,
the psychic spies for the Motherland were only in it for themselves.
It is the 1990s. The Cold War is long finished. In a remote Labrador
fishing village, an old woman known only as Babushka foresees her ending
through the harbour ice, in the giant eye of a dying kraken–and vows to
have none of it. Beaten insensible and cast adrift in a life raft,
ex-KGB agent Alexei Kilodovich is dragged to the deck of a ship full of
criminals, and with them he will embark on a journey that will change
everything he knows about himself. And from a suite in an unseen hotel
in the heart of Manhattan, an old warrior named Kolyokov sets out with
an open heart, to gather together the youngest members of his immense,
and immensely talented, family. They are more beautiful, and more
terrible, than any who came before them. They are Rasputin’s bastards.
And they will remake the world.
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