Full Description
This novel tells the story of Henry, a career diplomat who disappears without a trace one evening from his Moscow post, only to be discovered nearly a year later in a local hospital. Upon return to the United States, bedridden and dying of a heart condition, he feels an overwhelming compulsion to tell his wife and his daughter Lorina the story of his past, beginning with his Russian stepmother's escape from the Revolution and including his recent disappearance in Moscow. Most of his narrative, however, focuses on his experiences as a young translator at the Yalta conference of 1945, where Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met to decide the fate of post-war Europe. As Lorina listens to his tale, she wonders why this one event in her father's career seems to have become almost an obsession to the dying man. What happened at the conference to cause Henry to go to great lengths to share his secrets before he dies? And why is everyone from the State Department, the FBI, and even the Russian embassy still so interested in his recollections, so many years later? A thrilling story of plotting and counter-plotting, The Riviera of Hades is sure to interest fans of historical fiction everywhere.
