Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian, who is in Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet archives, receives in his hotel a very unexpected visitor.

An eccentric warden and his staff run a bizarre maximum security prison full of dangerous prisoners.

Talon, the lone survivor of a race called the Blackbloods, sets off to the edge of civilisation to track her family's killers. On her journey she discovers she has supernatural powers which she must learn to harness in order to achieve her goals.