The Bratinsky Affair

Wicklow, 1976. Countess Irina Bratinsky, an exiled Russian aristocrat and internationally connected dealer in Fabergé jewellery, dies when her house is destroyed by fire. Ambitious local journalist Tom O’Brien recognises a story that could move him beyond provincial reporting, but Irish, French and Soviet interest in the death suggests that Irina’s public career concealed espionage, blackmail and criminal relationships. Tom joins her granddaughter Olga to reconstruct the countess’s life and locate a missing family heirloom for which several people have already died.

Their investigation moves through revolutionary Russia, occupied France, post-war Paris and the criminal underworld of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. Irina’s exile, her relationship with Suzy Solidor and her compromises with intelligence services are set beside Tom’s effort to live more honestly as a gay man in 1970s Ireland. The search ultimately brings Tom and Olga into conflict with Irina’s brother Pavel, a survivor of the gulag who has become a powerful criminal and sees the family inheritance as an instrument of vengeance rather than reconciliation.