Blood and Faith

In the early 1990s, Moscow, Kiev, and Washington, DC were locked in an unusual conflict precipitated not by threats of bombs and missiles, but by a work of art. The ownership of Eastern Orthodoxy's most sacred icon had been contested for centuries between Russia and Ukraine and when Russia loaned it, as a goodwill gesture, to a small museum in Virginia, the faithful and faithless sought to possess it. Lara Cole, the museum's young and bewildered curator, finds herself in a maelstrom of love, intrigue and mortal danger.