Viscount Simon Nightingale-Temple seeks a life of peace with his beloved Mary after the harrowing years of the Bolshevik Revolution. But in Tsarina’s Jewels, the second book in Jerena Tobiasen’s The Nightingale and Sparrow Chronicles, Simon is dragged back into global conflict through his very family.
While serving in the British Embassy in Petrograd, Simon witnessed firsthand that bloody revolution and the assassination of the Tsar’s family—all but one daughter, Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna, the beautiful woman who became his wife.
Maria, “Mary”, hides in plain sight among the British aristocracy, and the couple hope to settle into their lives with Simon’s parents. However, soon after his return, the highest levels of the British government force Simon into service for the newly minted MI6. Under threat of being blamed entirely for the Romanov family’s execution, Simon has no choice but to accept.
Little does Simon know he’ll soon be spying on his own brother.
As the second son, Richard resents Simon’s success and future inheritance. After drinking and womanizing his allowance away, Richard is forced into a job by his father. Though he holds a respectable clerk’s position, Richard steals files concerning the British movements against the Ottoman Empire.
In a bid to become his own man, Richard now races to sell his secrets to the Turkish government.
Simon has to bear the weight of family obligation and looming treason all while trying to maintain his wife’s secret identity. When a threatening figure returns from his past and adds yet more pressure onto his shoulders, Simon’s life might well come crashing down around him.
The characters of Tsarina’s Jewels develop with compelling emotion in the face of trauma and responsibility, most of all Mary.
Mary, heir to the Russian throne, has lost everything—her home, her family, her very heritage. Still healing from her own physical wounds, she now contends with the full force of her grief. The Nightingale-Temple family helps to fill some of her emptiness, but nothing can entirely replace the family taken from her. Not only is she haunted by the happiness they shared, but also the image of their deaths in her dreams.
Despite all of this, she takes up the mantle of nurse to join her mother-in-law Ann as a volunteer in the local hospital. Mary does what she can to comfort a flood of Spanish Flu victims. Many are Russian immigrants, but Mary refuses to let her fears of recognition stop her from tending to her countrymen—in essence her people had the crown not been stripped from her family. Her brave soul is a shining light throughout the novel.
Even Richard shows a growing depth and capacity to change, although he can’t turn back from his crimes.
Initially, Richard seems entirely loathsome, and the novel appears to move in the formulaic classic spy novel. However, even before Richard begins his life-altering exodus from England, the reader sees a shift in his character. Richard is deeply in love with Sally, an unassuming and hard-working woman. Though he doesn’t voice the feeling aloud, his actions clearly show his devotion angst at leaving her.
As Simon gets closer to catching him, Richard weathers his clashing sentiments about the treasonous path to which he’s committed himself.
Tsarina’s Jewels combines thrilling spycraft with the intricacies of 1918 European conflict, a fresh and fascinating continuation for this historical fiction series. Tobiasen explores the internal conflicts of her characters to build them up as familiar, inspiring, and rewarding to care for, giving emotional life to both suspense and history.
Jerena Tobiasen delivers a sharp, first-rate novel in Tsarina’s Crown, first installment in The Nightingale and Sparrow Chronicles, capturing a precise panorama of Russian politics and British espionage during a delicate period in time.