Andrew Williams’s To Kill A Tsar is a fine thriller set in mid 19th Century St Petersburg, as a group of Socialist revolutionaries begin a campaign of terror across the city. Without giving too much away, the title gives a subtle clue as to this group’s primary intention.

The book opens with a failed attempt on the Tsar’s life outside The Winter Palace. A young British doctor is a physician to several members of the Imperial nobility, a tiny group sitting atop an entire nation built to serve an effete but autocratic elite. Unbeknown to his clientele, the good doctor is an ex-fellow traveller. Just as he is discussing the attacks within the city’s salons, he is drawn by bonds of loyalty back into the Socialist circle he thought he had left behind. Can he stay out of the group and can he stay ahead of the newly formed state security services?

This is not the period immediately before the revolution, rather the period of the emergence of revolutionary activity, fully fifty years before the Revolution of 1917. Instead of trying to portray this as popular imagination might have it, Williams has gone back to source material to bring the period to life. Secret service agents, nurses, society belle dames, anarchist students and a whole swathe of everyday Russians are brought to life to create something that passes muster as a convincing portrayal of a real place with real people.

The book runs out of a little bit of steam in the second half as it settles into a familiar cycle of attack and escape by the revolutionaries, and disgust and reluctant complicity by the good doctor.  But this is unfair. Williams has done a fine job pulling out the inherent contradictions and dead-ends that would be thrust into being in 1917 and how these contradictions were inherent from the off. This is a world of Imperial Tsarist oppression, but the revolutionaries themselves are a nascent self-serving elite, already in thrall to power, of maintaining a state of permanent paranoia and some already subsuming the revolution to their own ends.

To Kill A Tsar perhaps doesn’t sparkle like a book by my beloved Boris Akunin, but after all what does? Also, if the book can’t possibly be as complex as The Secret Agent, it does have something of Conrad’s intensity and his commitment to portray people acting in ways human beings might actually behave. This combination of research, flair and characters to care about is a winning formula, and To Kill A Tsar is that rare beast, an intelligent and exciting thriller worthy of your time.

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