THE PLOT TO KILL LENIN by Joseph Theroux
All RPCVs are encouraged to review this book or any other by an author with a Peace Corps connection for…
1917 — St. Petersburg has been renamed Petrograd. There are riots and breadlines, the rumblings of revolution. The secret police, the Cheka, and Red Guards roam the streets.
Somerset Maugham and Lloyd Osbourne have been tasked with locating the Great Orlov, a stolen Imperial jewel — its value could fund the war effort against Germany. The Provisional Government President Alexander Kerensky has drawn them into an assassination plot. Maugham and Osbourne, in their roles as secret agents, encounter a remarkable number of characters. including Jack Reed the socialist reporter, the young poet Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist Hugh Walpole, a precocious Ayn Rand, the assassin Boris Savinkov and Thomas Masaryk the future president of Czechoslovakia. The pointe shoes of Anna Pavlova have appeared in a pawn shop. Maugham and Osbourne must negotiate a world of spies and double agents in order to take down the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin, who has ordered the execution of Lloyd Osbourne.
Joseph Theroux
Joseph Theroux served as a Peace Corps teacher in Western Samoa from 1975 to 1978, and taught high school in Hawaii before becoming a principal there.
He has published numerous mystery novels, stories and historical articles in The Hawaiian Journal of History, The Journal of Pacific History, Honolulu Magazine, Hawaii Magazine, Historic Nantucket and Aloha Magazine, among others.
He is married to the former Diane Younghans of Pittsburgh. He now lives on Cape Cod, and participates in community theater at the Chatham Drama Guild, where he also serves on their Board.
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The Plot to Kill Lenin: With Somerset Maugham in Russia
by Joseph Theroux (Western Samoa 1975-78)
Kilauea Publishing
293 pages
Novel
April 2022
$ 4.00 (Kindle); $10.00 (Paperback)
Is this nonfiction? I’m a bit confused though I love a good mystery.
It is a novel.
All RPCVs are encouraged to review this book or any other by an author with a Peace Corps connection for peacecorpsworldwide.org ! The key person to know about is Marian Haley Beil (marian@haleybeil.com). Once you find a book you would like to review, you can email her and request that she send you a review copy of the book.
When I’m looking for potential books to review I click on “New Books by Peace Corps Writers” under topics on the right side of the screen. That gives me the most recent PC Writers books, newest group first.
Another way I search for books is to click on the search icon and then type “new books” into the search box. This will give you various entries of book announcements. They are posted more or less quarterly.
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Another place to search for books to review is to go to the main site, peacecorpsworldwide.org , click on “Books and Writers” and then click on “Books Available for Review”. The books listed there tend to be slightly older books that have not yet been reviewed. But be sure to check whether it has been reviewed by searching on the title as described above.