A frozen island.
A monastery-turned-political-prison.
A cipher inked in blood.
When anarchist poet Katya Efremova is transferred to the prison colony on Solovetsky Island, she finds an enigma among her returned possessions - a blood-stained book containing a cipher left by her murdered mother, written on the day she died.
Following her mother's clues, Katya begins to unravel a centuries-old mystery woven into the history of Solovetsky Island. Finding the island's legendary power might be the key to overthrowing the Bolshevik regime, but Katya wasn't sent to Solovetsky by chance. The head of the government's spy network is watching, and there will be no hope of a free Russia if he takes hold of the magic hidden beneath the White Sea snow.
Delphine Lecompte has devoted her journalistic career to exposing secrets, but there's one mystery she's never been able to crack. After her mother's assassination when Delphine was eight, the police were unable to locate her father, or any record that he ever existed. An anonymous donor paid for Delphine to attend an elite boarding school. When she broke into the school office to find her records, Delphine discovered the tuition cheques were being sent from Paris. The address eventually led her to the Palais de l'Institut.
Inside the palace, five councils operate in utmost secrecy. The oldest council is L'Académie Française. Composed of forty members of the literary community who call themselves "Immortals", the Academy oversees the purity and correct usage of the French language - though their true purpose is far more sinister.
When a member of the Academy vanishes under mysterious circumstances, Delphine recognises his photograph as the newspaper comes off the press - it's her father, who she hasn't seen in nearly twenty years. Delphine reluctantly teams up with her ex-fiancé Laurent, a Flemish scholar who has his own urgent reasons for investigating the French Academy. And as they immerse themselves in a world of deadly secrets, they uncover a conspiracy going back centuries...
