Blood and Faith in Bloomington, MN

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.