The Correspondent of Petrograd

What's next for the most successful assassin in my family's 2000 year old history of murder and mayhem?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

It's the spring of 1912 and my great-uncle Leon, freshly returned to London after his assignments for the British Secret Service Bureau in Africa and Asia-including a crash course in sexual technique at the Heavenly Abode of the Crimson Lotus-is ready to settle down.

With the help of his friend Sir Philip Sassoon, he sets himself up as a society columnist. But as war looms large in Europe, dinners with the likes of George Bernard Shaw and T.E. Lawrence, and displaying his skills in the boudoirs of high society matrons, are put on hold for new and more perilous assignments from the Secret Service.

Against overwhelming odds and with the assistance of the mysterious Mata Hari, Leon takes out a double agent in Vienna, dispatches a Turkish brothel-owning spy in Hamburg, and ends up in Petrograd, where his hitherto unknown involvement in the death of Rasputin is finally revealed.

Once again, Leon does his part to rid the world of rogues and tyrants.