Customer Reviews

The Romanov Prophecy

5 star:		(49)
4 star:		(40)
3 star:		(34)
2 star:		(20)
1 star:		(18)

 

 

If enough people knew about this book to put it on the best seller list, I have no doubt it would become the phenomenon that is The DeVinci Code. That's how good this book is.
The book is built upon that much debunked but won't die theory that one or more of the Romanov children escaped the basement in Ekateranberg where the rest of the Imperial family was murdered. Because the escape of at least one child, Anastasia, is a well known urban myth, the plot will feel familiar to those who don't know a whole lot about the former Imperial rulers of Russia.
The plot is plausable once you get over the fact that the entire urban myth about any Romanov's surviving the murder scene is laughable and has no basis in reality. But getting over that isn't hard if all you want is a good read. It is, after all, a fiction book.
The chase and escape scenes are at least as well done and believable as those in The DeVinci Code with the exception of one towards the end of the book. But because it is fiction, I'm inclined to give the author a pass on that scene.
The premise of a Russian return to tsarism in the book, while far fetched, isn't out of the relm of eventual possibility as Russians search to rid themselves of the mafia style oligarchs that have hijacked their attempts at dimocracy and find a style of government that actually can deliver on its promises.
The author has also provided an extremely well designed premise for how Anastasia and Alexi could have survived the murder of their family and stayed in hiding throughout Lenin and Stalin's regimes. He builds well upon the Russian hiding of so much in their archives and Stalin's well known paranoia. If anyone would have gone to great lengths to cover an escape up had he known about it, it would be Stalin.

I also give the author credit for not claiming, unlike another well known author, save for some quotations from Rasputin and character sketches of some of the dead Romanovs and other people that appear in the book, that ANY of this fiction is real.
If you're looking for a good read based upon real historical people, this book is it.

Communism has fallen and the Russian people, not convinced of the value of a western style democracy, have decided to return to the monarchy. A specially appointed commission is about to annoint a new Tsar, the most logical alternatives being the living relatives of the Romanov family executed by revolutionaries in 1917. The Russian Mafia and wealthy American business elements, including Taylor Hayes, senior partner of a major US law firm, are not about to let go of the reins of power in Russia and lose the position and wealth they've amassed. They'll do whatever is necessary to ensure that their puppet, Stefan Baklanov, is the candidate chosen by the commission to accede to the throne and have asked Miles Lord, an associate in Hayes' firm, to investigate Imperial Russian and early Communist historical records to ensure that Baklanov's claim is the best it can possibly be. When Miles' archival search begins to uncover evidence that might jeopardize the Mafia's plans for the outcome of the commission election, the proverbial thriller messy stuff hits the fan. Of course, the chase is on to eliminate Lord and make sure the evidence is destroyed!

At one point during his seach, Miles Lord was deep in thought in the stacks of a Russian archive library, examining some recently de-classified top secret papers. When he was interrupted by Semyon Pashenko, professor of history at Moscow University, he commented " ... I was back in 1916 for an instant. Reading this stuff is like time travel." How appropriate for Berry to put such a statement into the mouth of his hero. I completely agree - that's exactly what reading a historical thriller should be! The transition from meticulously researched background to speculation, then into fiction and full throttle thriller and back again should be completely seamless and effortless. From this viewpoint, The Romanov Prophecy succeeds reasonably well.

But, insofar as the modern thriller part of the novel is concern, Berry's efforts are pretty weak fare. The love interest, Akilina Petrovna, a circus gymnast Lord meets during a train sequence in one of the overly frequent chase scenes, is cute, cuddly and warm. But, what the heck, she's mandatory! Who would expect a novel like this to be without some version of a femme? Orleg and Droopy, the Russian Mafia thugs are perhaps intended to be comic in some fashion - who can forget Mr Wint and Mr Kidd from 007's "Diamonds are Forever" - but their hapless efforts to chase down Lord only get them recognition as "Dumb and Dumber". Character development in general is one-dimensional. In particular, Berry makes no attempt at all to explain why Lord and Petrovna were destined to fulfill the roles of the Raven and the Eagle in a multi-national achievement of a 100 year old prophesy babbled by Rasputin just before he died. We are left to merely wonder what happened to the Russian members of the power cartel after Thorn's ascension to the throne and Baklanov's failure in the commission's vote!

Don't go into this one with high expectations! If you're looking for a pure escapist thriller, you won't be disappointed - the scenes with the gorillas and the Russian borzoi hounds are pure Hollywood gone right over the top. Forget trying to find anything deeper - it just isn't there! Sit back, read, enjoy and have fun - don't think too hard about it.

I had such high hopes for The Romanov Prophecy by Steve Berry. Most people know the tragic fate of the last tsar and his family, and rumors have swirled for almost a century about possible survivors. When the remains were exhumed in 1991 and the skeletons of two of the royal children were missing, it just added fuel to the fire. Berry took the known facts, and added lots of fantasy to embellish this tale. But somewhere along the line, he dropped the ball.

The Romanov Prophecy opens in modern day Russia. The Russian people are tired of the lawlessness and economic uncertainty that have plagued their country since the fall of communism, and have decided to restore the monarchy. A 17 member independent Tsarist Commission has been appointed to find the "true" tsar. There are nine or ten Romanov claimants that need to be investigated. Stefan Baklanov seems to be the frontrunner, and his claim is bolstered by a secret group consisting of government officials, the military, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian Mafia and a group of American businessmen with companies in Russia. Their goal is to bribe the members of the Tsarist Commission to make sure Stefan assumes the crown, and then control the new tsar like a puppet. The American's are financing this plot through an American law firm, Pridgen and Woodworth.

The main character, Miles Lord, is an African American lawyer from South Carolina who speaks fluent Russian. An employee of Pridgen and Woodworth, his job is to sift through Russian archives to find anything that might affect Baklanov's claim to the throne. After weeks of research, Lord finds documents (one from Lenin) that allude to the fact that several of Tsar Nicholas II's children survived the massacre in Yekaterinburg. But this new evidence now proves dangerous to Lord, and those representing Baklanov now want Lord killed. Lord gains the assistance of a beautiful acrobat in the Russian Circus, and together, they try to flee those trying to kill him. He is assisted by a secret organization, and must find clues and solve puzzles to discover the true secret of the Romanov's fate. Of course, he also must travel extensively at breakneck speed. In this sense, The Romanov Prophecy reads like John Grisham meets Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code).

While I enjoy historical fiction and I am not opposed to a little fantasy, The Romanov Prophecy is just too unbelievable. The fact that the Russian's would restore the monarchy is perhaps the biggest stretch of all. Also, do we really think that so many Russian factions (mafia, church, military, etc.) would all agree on anything? Or that two Russian mafia goons and a corrupt policeman could travel the world chasing Lord, without any problems with passports and visas? Or that the FBI and American police would be so easily fooled by the Russians without double checking? Or that the KGB has informants in US banks where they monitor bank accounts and safety deposit boxes that might still contain tsarist gold? Also, Lord is supposed to be a brilliant lawyer, but he's totally clueless in figuring out who is betraying him (it takes more than a house to fall on Lord).

So while I enjoyed The Romanov Prophecy and was anxious to see how it played out, I just think it had the potential to be so much more. Still, I gave it three stars as it combines two of my favorites-Romanov history in a mystery setting.

I'm a traditional mystery sort of person. That said and out of the way, THE ROMANOV PROPHECY kept me reading into the wee hours. Depite the improbable chase scene at the beginning (and, come to think of it, the numerous chase scenes throughout the story) I was perfectly willing to cheer for Miles Lord every single time he eluded the clutches of the nefarious bad guys (people of no redeeming qualities whatsoever).

Taking a nebulous historical hint (the words of the notoriously bad-smelling Rasputin) and creating Miles Lord's full-blown quest from it is no mean feat, but Steve Berry seems to have been up to the challenge. The survivors -- no, I'm not giving anything away. What would be the point of the book if there weren't survivors of the Romanov massacre? -- both surprised me and satisfied me.

A good read indeed.

Readers of THE ROMANOV PROPHECY will have problems with suspension of disbelief. Rasputin becomes a hero of sorts and Felix Yussoupov, Rasputin's assassin, becomes a protector of the Romanov birthright.

The wild twists and turns start with a plebiscite to determine whether the Russian government should return to an autocracy. Steve Berry, the author, works hard to convince the reader that a democratic people would agree to such a thing. The Russian mafia is out of control; the Russian people's mystical relationship with the Tsar is another argument.

The hero of the piece is Miles Lord a lawyer working for Pridgen & Woodworth, an American law firm promoting the candidacy of Stefan Baklanov. Unbeknownst to Lord, his immediate boss, Taylor Hayes, is part of a conspiracy of Russian mafia, former Communist party aparchniks, and America businessmen who want to establish a puppet Russian government under Baklanov. It's Lord's job to make sure Baklanov doesn't have any skeletons in his closet. While researching in the Russian archives, he stumbles across papers that point to the possible survival of two of Nicholas II's children. Now Lord's life is at risk as Hayes and his fellow conspirators set out to silence him. Hayes's underlings chase Lord all over Russia, across the Pacific to San Francisco and across America to North Carolina. Lord has more lives than the proverbial cat. Not even the gorillas (real ones) in a San Francisco zoo can stop him.

Surprisingly, the above worked for me. I guess it was because I hadn't had a Romanov fix since THE KITCHEN BOY by Robert Alexander. Berry keeps us guessing most of the way. Did one or more of the Romanov children survive the massacre at Yaketerinburg? I think most of us Romanov lovers want that to be true, and Berry makes good use of historical accounts from Bolshevik guards etc. to make it seem plausible.

Yet another in the long line of garbage cranked out to cash in on the success of the DaVinci Code. I wouldn't mind that so much if there was some intelligence to the situations and characters. The Lord character could be brilliant when the autor needed him to be, and incredibly stupid when the author needed him to be in a predicament but couldn't think of a more clever way of getting him into it (Would anyone with an ounce of sense have gone to the Russian consulate with as lame a plan as Lord had? Was Lord the only human on Earth that couldn't connect Hayes to all the bad things happening to him?)

Don't waste your time on this one.

"Write what you know" is advice often offered to writers. Steve Berry should have heeded that advice. He doesn't speak Russian, nor does he know much about Russia.

His incorrect Russian was like a fingernail dragging across a chalkboard through the whole novel. Instead of Nikolskiy prospect, we get Nikolskaya. A babushka becomes a bobushka. And he dresses a Russian policeman in a woman's hat or "shlapa," which is actually written shlyapa. That's hardly an exhaustive list. Orleg (did he mean Oleg?) eats his bliny like an American, using syrup, rather than tvarog and jam.

Not that Berry's English is all that powerful. "And other than the man in the archives, whom he'd thought might be watching ..." Whom? Who would do just fine. Unleashing his creativity to write in a staccato, hard-boiled style, Berry pens: "He spent at least nine weeks a year traveling the world on expeditions. Canadian caribou and geese. Asian pheasant and wild sheep. European red stag and fox. ...." I don't think semi-colons would spoil the canvas here.

Don't expect any psychological depth from Berry's characters. Insights on what makes his characters tick appear as afterthoughts, plopped down on paper. Chapter 18 ends with: "Just like his father." Clunk. Evil-doer Hayes stands on a hill overlooking Moscow where "the Kremlin cathedrals peaked through a cold haze like tombstones in a fog." Is Hayes sensing his own death? He doesn't appear to be. So what's the reader to make of this image? Don't dig deeply. My guess is that it's only a doodad to give the work the semblance of the profound thought and observation expected in good literature.

Believability is an important quality of fiction. Berry lost all believability when he wrote that DNA testing confirmed that Michael Thorn was directly descended from the Russian Tsar Nicholas. He stated that Michael's "genetic structure matched Nicholas's exactly, even containing the same mutation scientists had found when Nicholas's bones were identified in 1994."

In the case Berry refers to, scientists tested mitochondrial DNA, which is only passed down the female line. Michael's mother got her mitochondrial DNA from her mother. Her mother got hers from her mother, etc.

If Michael Thorn's mitochondrial DNA matches Nicholas's, then Michael Thorn's mother is related to a female in Nicholas's mother's family.

Yet, that can't be. Berry states that Michael Thorn's mother, a Russian refugee living in America, was "Russian born to noble blood." Nicholas's mother's family is Danish. Thus, the results of the DNA test actually mean that Michael Thorn is not the Tsar. When science speaks, Berry's story disappears. That's just plain sloppy writing and editing.

Berry seems to have developed a recipe: take a foreign vacation, find colorful sights, take copious notes for descriptions, salt and pepper with foreign words, boil down local history to Cliff Notes sketches and attach them to scenery, simmer with a stock plot, and voila!

I got to page 120 when my "b.s." meter pegged out. Either all Russian mafia and police are incompetent buffoons ala Keystone Kops, or Johnnie Cochran got reincarnated with the powers of Superman. To believe a black research attorney working in Moscow could avoid five (count 'em FIVE) assassination attempts in two days goes beyond believability, Denzel or not. I wanted to enjoy this read but it wasn't to be found here.

Like many readers, I was drawn to "The Romanov Prophecy" by the author's very original premise that an heir to the Tsar may have survived and might even be welcomed back to the throne by 21st-century Russians. An interest in this kind of history may be enough to make people like this book; however, even limited experience with modern-day Russia is enough to make other people (like me) reject Steve Berry's attempt to use this country as a setting for his Da Vinci Code knockoff.

Fiction is fiction, but I believe that an author bears some responsibility for accurately portraying the non-fictional parts of a story--in this case, Russia and its people. Berry's future Russia seems to be based on early-1990s news reports from Moscow. Putin is mentioned once, but otherwise the intervening decade conveniently disappears (the book was published in 2004). An assassination-happy mafia provides stereotypical (if remarkably incompetent) villains regardless of current reality. They even conveniently speak surly and badly-accented English.

Berry uses racism to add cheap conflict for his hero, African-American lawyer Miles Lord. In the book it is harmless, but the reality of Russian prejudice is much less charitable. Especially once he was on the run, Lord would have been scrutinized (at the very least) by every policeman he met, and most Russians casually refer to black people with a term that's guaranteed to offend American ears. It is possible that Berry deliberately chose to water this down (he worked hard to establish "chornyi", or black, as a derogatory term), but so much for careful research producing an authentic setting.

I don't need to repeat the criticisms of the book's plot and writing style; it reads like Berry wants to make the movie adaptation as easy as possible. Basic errors like confusing dollars and rubles just shouldn't occur, but they do. The idea that a visiting American lawyer could find archived documents (allowing himself to fulfill a prophecy, no less) where a generation of Russian and Western scholars have failed moves past insulting implausibility into the realm of the miraculous. Perhaps God hasn't forgotten about Russia after all.

It's already too late for me to avoid buying this book, but I couldn't bear to keep it on my shelf. In the end, I decided to send it back to Berry.

The author claims to be an expert on Russia (at least, there is no single Russian name in his Acknowledgments, which probably means that in his arrogance he thought he can pull this novel by himself).
I was going to write about the book being bad literary - but there's enough written about it already. So, let me tell you just this - Mr.Berry appears to have no clue about Russia. Has he even been there? Some of his remarks through the book make me think he hasn't. Although he might have - but never stepped outside his hotel and never talked to Russian people. He starts with making up Russian personal and geographical names, and finishes with offending Russians in general. Too many lies show unfamiliarity with the country and its culture.
I know what I am talking about - I was born and spent most of my life in Russia (in Moscow).
Mr.Berry, there is no such a Russian surname as "Petrovna" (your lovely heroine, Akilina Petrovna). "Petrovna" is a middle name, or - a paternal name for a female whose father's name is Peter (Petr). She might have been Petrova. As to Akilina, it doesn't mean ANYTHING in "old Russian", it means "eagle-like" in Latin. There is a Russian name AKULINA, which was perhaps derived from the Latin AKILINA, but don't call it "old Russian".
There are LOTS of discrepancies in the book that could have been eliminated had the author done some research, or asked an educated Russian to proof-read the script before publishing it.
The overall impression - depressing. And it made a best-seller list, too. Amazing.