David Nickle’s latest novel, a thriller with fantasy elements, is overly long and has a highly convoluted plot, both of which serve to undermine the suspense.

Rasputin’s Bastards involves several groups of bad guys working to best one another for no apparent reason. The catalyst is a mysterious group of psychic Soviet sleeper agents, whose leader has decided to break free from his masters and take over the world. Ranged against them are a motley collection of rebels from their own ranks, human traffickers, Mafioso, and a James Bond-esque mastermind with unlimited financial resources and a love of torture.

Much of the action takes place in the minds of the characters, switching back and forth from their childhoods to later years in remote locations across the globe, such that the reader never knows where, when, or indeed if anything that happens actually happens.

The constant switching between viewpoints and locations is only one cause of confusion. The maze of plot twists and innumerable, similarly named characters make it virtually impossible to get a clear idea of what’s happening. Even Nickle’s characters labour under this confusion. Three or four times they actually ask one another what’s going on, and each time their requests for clarity are deflected, leaving the reader with yet more confusion.

This book is not sufficiently well written, suspenseful, or mature to hold an adult reader. Yet the language is such that most parents wouldn’t want their children to read it. And the profanity only increases as the page count mounts. With characters that create little sympathy, a plot that is nearly impossible to follow, and old-fashioned pulp fiction techniques written in prose that matches these ambitions, this novel is difficult to recommend.