Anthony Sloman

Hard Edge

John and Ben go on a survival-games weekend together where they intensely annoy the sergeant in charge. After the games are over John and Ben hang around and meet up with the sergeant who drunkenly challenges them to another game the next day. This time the sergeant and his friends turn up with real guns.

Assassin of the Tsar

A new doctor from Moscow arrives at a provincial mental institution. His interest is the peculiarities of the psyche of a patient who believes that he is Yakov Yurovsky, the man who assassinated the last Russian tsar. In the course of their conversations it transpires that the patient is a kind of philosopher, not without a gift for suggestion. In a while the doctor himself falls under his patient’s influence: he tends to relive that fatal night of June 16-17, 1918 when, without any investigation or trial, Tsar Nicholas II, who had recently abdicated, was murdered, together with his wife, daughters and incurably ill heir. Soon the doctor realizes that the tragedy of the last Russian tsar is in part his own tragedy, too...