THE PLOT TO KILL LENIN by Joseph Theroux

 

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.

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)

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