Palpably contrived although rich in ambience and marvelously entertaining, Bull's new erotic swashbuckler revisits Count Alexander Karlov, the dashing and sensual young Russian hero from Shanghai Station
. Picking up the action four years later in the Paris of 1922, we find Alexander, now 22, searching for his twin sister, Katia, who at age 17 was raped and kidnapped from the Trans-Siberian train by the Karlovs' bitter enemy, Soviet Commissar Viktor Polyak—the same assassin who murdered their mother and later killed their father in Shanghai. Alexander doesn't know that Polyak is already in Paris and awaiting the arrival of Katia, who—now the mother of Polyak's son and thoroughly brainwashed by the best Party training schools adept in the art of assassination—is carrying out a mission to kill a Party enemy in Poland. Miraculously, the siblings reunite and flee for Shanghai on the steamer China Star
while Polyak relentlessly chases them through Cairo, Bombay, Ceylon and to Shanghai. At times more travelogue and tour guide (with some romance) than cliffhanger, Bull has delivered another light, lithe read. (June)
