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Author Dan Smith can always be relied on for a spine-tingling adventure story. Heaps of reviews!

DAN Smith can be relied on for a spine-tingling adventure story.

Following his last thriller, The Child Thief, set in the Ukraine, he revisits Russia in an earlier period, 1920.

The country is in the grip of political and military turmoil as Nikolai (Kolya) Levitsky deserts his Red Army in the dead of winter and returns home.

Hoping to reunite with his wife and two sons, he finds his village abandoned. The men have been taken away and the women and children have disappeared.

Kolya sets out through the bleak landscape and haunted forests desperately seeking his family.

But he has another agenda -to hunt down a dark mythological figure known as Koschei the Deathless and his gang of men who reap destruction everywhere.

A terrifying figure from the country’s folklore and a story told by grandmothers in countless villages, is the dastardly Koschei mythical or really responsible for the wanton acts of murder and violence and the disappearance of men, women and children including Kolya’s wife and sons?

The scene and atmosphere are immediately set through Kolya’s eyes as he returns to his now silent, desolate home.

A cast of believable characters adds depth and reality to a mesmerising historical thriller.

It also throws up the question: who are the real victims in a civil war?

The scene and atmosphere are immediately set through Kolya’s eyes as he returns to his now silent, desolate home.