Emperor's Candlesticks

In the shadowy world of turn-of-the-century espionage, two deadly opponents find themselves locked in a desperate race. A young idealist fighting for the anarchist cause and a beautiful agent of the Tsar's secret police both discover that hollow candlesticks, destined to carry messages from the Austrian Emperor to a Russian princess, could be the most dangerous objects in Europe. When the candlesticks vanish at the border, each knows that failure means death. What begins as a mission of espionage becomes something more complex: a deadly game where the boundaries between enemy and lover blur, and where the only certainty is betrayal. Orczy, creator of The Scarlet Pimpernel, delivers a pulse-pounding adventure that helped birth the modern spy thriller.