To The Last Page

There's a lot of high praise going around for this book, but for a number of reasons it just doesn't seem justified to me. Primarily and perhaps crucially, it's not all that exciting as an espionage thriller. Bequest is certainly political on a large scale, relating to a race between Ukrainian and Russian agents to find records pertaining to a legendary reserve of Ukrainian Cossack gold deposited in a London bank by Nationalists in keeping for their country when it achieves independence. Additionally the novel takes in different time periods relating to the attempts by various agencies and descendants to recoup the quite extraordinary amount that has been sitting in a London vault for almost 300 years. Even so, there's little initially here to advance the story other than weeding through old documents, legal papers and even diary entries – nothing that is going to provide anything in terms of elements of surprise or tension to keep the reader involved. What passes for ...