A Matter of Honor

This is not Jeffrey Archer at his best. The plot was very slow developing, and I thought it was stupid. The powers that be in Russia discovered that the “Czar’s icon of St. George,” a revered piece of artwork that has been hanging at the Winter Palace in Leningrad under heavy guard for 50 years, is a fake. They surmise that the czar must have hidden it just prior to the time the Red Army overran the Winter Palace at the outset of the Russian Revolution. Maybe the czar thought he could use it to bargain for his life and that of his family, but the Romanovs were all executed before he could do so. The story takes place in 1966, and the General Secretary of the Communist party wants the real one found urgently. He has a month before an unexplained deadline, and he is willing to pay almost anything and authorize almost anything in order to find the real one. The Russians deposit $770 million in a NY bank without explanation. It is not until 2/3 of the way through the book when the reader finds out the reason that murders are being committed in the hunt to find the icon. A secret was contained in a document hidden in the icon, a document that indicated that the 1867 treaty in which Russia sold Alaska (“Seward’s Folly) to the U.S. for $7.2 million was really only a 99-year lease agreement, not a permanent sale. The treaty actually had a buy-back agreement which in today’s terms, was a bargain for the Russians. That’s when I quit reading. The characters were interesting enough, although once again, not up to what I’ve come to expect from Archer. The book does not get my recommendation.