Hougan is half the team behind the best-selling thrillers by "John Case" Nicola Ward is a divorced schoolteacher living in Maine, when one day a mysterious trunk arrives, sent to her long ago from China. Inside are family papers, photographs . . . and a Russian diary. To translate the diary, Nicola hires Neil Walker, a burnt-out spy who turned to scholarly research after one too many missions went sour. Neil's past comes in handy, though, when Nicola starts receiving death threats clearly connected with the contents of the trunk. But what stirred up the hornets' nest? The diary, which appears to identify Nicola as the heir to the Romanov throne? Or could something else be pointing the way to a Soviet mole in the U.S. government?