The Scalpel Slipped

The Scalpel Slipped follows Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov across three decades — from the winter night in 1912 when he began mapping Europe's fracture lines, through the catastrophe of 1914, to his exile and death in Nice in 1927.

In 2025, a doctoral researcher finds a leather-bound notebook in a second-hand bookshop in Provence. What it contains rewrites how the Great War began — and forces him to choose between silence and speech.

This is a work of fiction. All intelligence reports, private documents, and internal correspondence depicted are invented. No institution referenced endorses this work.