Charlie Doig is a bit of a thug. As he says himself: 'I kill, I screw, I survive ... You show me a better way of winning and I'll change, become all delicate.' Perhaps a certain robustness in personal relationships is necessary when it’s 1918 and you have recently become one of the richest men in the world, but your wealth is in the form of twenty-eight tons of tsarist gold on a barge stuck on a sandbank in the Volga River.

This is the third of the Doig thrillers and it opens with a brief reprise of events so far. Doig is the child of a Russian mother and English father. Growing up, he becomes interested in natural history. In this aspect too, Doig is a buccaneer, a sort