Bruce Hutchison

THE ROMANOV CONSPIRACY A Clayton Lovell Stone Adventure Bruce Hutchison

A gripping, historical fiction murder mystery. In the Siberian winter of 1921, two tons of Tsarist' gold secretly travel by rail to Alexander Kolchak, Supreme Commander of the White Army in Siberia fighting the Bolshevik Communist Reds. The gold never arrived. For the next hundred years that vast treasure was thought to have been sledded out onto frozen Lake Baikal sink in the spring melt. When Marta Russco, a Russian reporter and friend of Clayton Lovell Stone's, is brutally murdered in Siberia, Stone weaves through a tightening web of political corruption, contract murder, and Putin's secret love life in search of the martyred Tsar's lost gold. But while Stone follows the trail of lost gold, others after that gold seek to silence Stone in the frozen depths of Lake Baikal. Clayton Lovell Stone, former FBI Art and Artifacts investigator, quits the agency in disgust to open a restaurant in Annapolis, Maryland, overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. But when he reluctantly concedes that he's addicted the danger and excitement of the chase, he takes on private art and antiquities investigations to keep his mind form his adrenaline flowing and his mind in gear. Each Clayton Lovell Stone mystery/adventure is based on actual, lost-or-stolen art or artifact in which the current investigation can only be resolved by unraveling an earlier historical mystery.