Field of Mars

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

There is a somewhat familiar ring to the beginning of this second novel
by Stephen Miller, a Vancouver actor and writer. A hardened and
apolitical police investigator whose wife has left him is disgusted by
official indifference to the murder of a child prostitute in a brothel
frequented by the rich and the influential and sets out to find the
killer. We’ve seen similar premises before, and we know that before
(or if) he reaches his goal, our detective will have been pressured and
violently threatened by the powerful, that he will be warned off the
case by his superiors, and that skeins of political corruption will be
revealed. What makes this thriller above average is its setting: the
murder is in St. Petersburg in late 1913. Among the clients at the
brothel are tsarist officers and even Rasputin, the licentious monk who
wielded much power over the Russian royal family and thus over its
government.

The reader knows, of course, the horrible fates awaiting Rasputin and
the Romanovs, and Russia herself. In an exciting finale, the story draws
us into a vast conspiracy to ignite a war into which Russia will be
drawn and the Romanovs replaced. The climatic chapters, which take our
protagonist to Sarajevo and to one of the most fateful days of the 20th
century, will keep a reader up late even though we know that our hero
will be unable to prevent the political assassination that will spark a
world conflict.

One might wish the middle of the book was more taut, though. Back
stories of characters lead to an excessive amount of internal musing by
many of them, and some of the sex seems gratuitous. Field of Mars might
be more consistently exciting if it was shorter, but it is still a
diverting and historically interesting entertainment.