The Murder of The Romanovs by Andrew Cook

A history book that uses recently released sources to lay conspiracy theories about the survival of the Romanov family to rest. This is obviously well researched with a full bibliography of sources at the back, and is filled with a surprising number of illustrations for a short book. Cook goes into a great deal of detail about the last few months of the family.

However, I did have reservations about the book. Whilst there is a bibliography of sources divided into themes, I found it strange that there were no proper footnotes or endnotes. Whilst I don't always read all the footnotes, I suppose I find it reassuring to know exactly where the historian has found their information and to tell what angle they are taking with it. Also, I thought this lacked analysis. Most of the book was taken up with the description of what had happened, a small chapter at the end described what was in the newly released documents, then the rest was taken up with the original sources. I felt like I might as well just read the sources direct. The lack of analysis made the history somewhat dry and overall I found this quite an odd book.