Farrell is assigned to cover a story at the Churchill Auction House. Also attending the auction is her old school friend Pat Devereaux, who owns a consignment shop. Pat is there because she is selling her client, Olga’s Faberge pin. Pat’s college age son Peter is there and in the course of the day she meets his favorite Russian History professor, Tim Kavanaugh.

Churchill chooses this day to auction a Faberge egg, allegedly the last made but never delivered to the czar. The egg brings 6 million dollars from an anonymous buyer. Peter however has seen an identical egg at Olga’s and believes the one sold to be a fake, although Clifford Montgomery, the president of the house, had authenticated the egg personally. Farrell is eventually drawn into this mystery.

Meanwhile over in Brighton Beach, the Russian community, Misha an enameller who works for an antique operation is brutally dismembered in an unexplained slaying, virtually while the FBI in the persona of Jack McCord had him under surveillance. The killer is introduced in the prologue as he shops for murder weapons in a building supply store. Although his identity is not discovered until well into the story, the reader quickly has a glimpse of a very twisted mind.

The purchaser of Olga’s pin is also involved in this affair as Nadine, an aging ballerina, is trying to identify her father. He had made this particular brooch and it was the match to the one she had inherited from her mother. Nadine hopes now that she has both of them that she can discover his identity.

All of these divergent interests suggest an extremely complicated plot. And indeed it is, one permeated by greed and fear, but obviously linked. The story is event driven rather than character driven and at the end the reader has the satisfaction of having an intricate puzzle solved, but done so without any emotional investment in the lives of the characters.

This is best illustrated by the fact that the book is less than 300 pages long, and has 139 chapters. The author uses the device of creating a new chapter to represent each scene shift, point of view shift or character shift. Consequently the book jumps around with every 2 or 3 pages being separate and distinct, never flowing forward, but sketchy, choppy and shifting far too rapidly for ease of reading.

However, Do You Promise Not to Tell contains insight into both a TV producer’s life and the Russian émigrée community, plus the glamour and allure of Faberge which elevate it to an average read.

--Thea Davis