A Dangerous Climate - 9780765319814

As a long-lived vampire, the Count Saint-Germain has assumed many identities over the centuries - usually masquerading as a distant relation in order to claim his own estates and property after his supposed death. In A Dangerous Climate, Saint-Germain must be someone else entirely - a Hungarian count and a spy in the court of the Czar.
The swampy lowland that will someday be Saint Petersburg is little more than a collection of muddy streets and tiny, cold, simple wooden houses in the early 1700s. Seemingly by the strength of his will alone, the Czar, Peter the Great, is wrestling his capital city into existence on the banks of the Neva ... and on the backs, sweat, and blood of thousands of ill-paid, ill-housed, ill-fed workers.
Floods, swarms of insects, bone-numbing cold, and the possibility of rebellion among the city's builders cannot dissuade representatives of Europe's governments from making the newborn city their home as they jockey for favor with the Czar. When a Hungarian noble disappears soon before his mission was to have begun, the Count Saint-Germain is forced to take his identity - and his wife, who has a secret mission of her own - to Russia.
Layer upon layer of deception falls upon the vampire. He must convince the world at large that he is Count Arpad Arco-Tolvay. He must convince the count's servants that he and his "wife" are really husband and wife, though they are virtual strangers to one another. He must counterfeit being human and alive, lest his wife suspect something is amiss - and yet he cannot compromise her virtue, for she is married, though not to him.
When a newcomer to Saint Petersburg claims to be the Count Saint-Germain, the vampire has a new problem on his hands: how to protect his good name and property from the impostor without revealing his true identity - or worse, his True Nature?