The Bratinsky Affair
By Jim Loughran
Publication Date: 14th February 2025
Publisher: Sharpe Books
Print Length: 281 Pages
Genre: Historical Thriller
Wicklow, 1976.
The dramatic death of Countess Irina Bratinsky, a well-connected dealer in Fabergé jewellery, becomes international news.
But why are the Irish, French and Russian police so interested in her death?
For journalist Tom O’Brien it’s an opportunity to advance his career as he exposes the countess’s secrete life of espionage and crime.
Tom meets Irinia’s granddaughter Olga – and they retrace Irina’s steps from revolutionary Russia to war torn France.
Inexorably they are drawn into the search for a missing family heirloom – a mystery which has already claimed three lives.
When Irina’s long lost brother Pavel emerges from the gulag as one of the most ruthless criminals in Brezhnev’s Russia he has vengeance on his mind rather than reconciliation.
In their search for answers Tom and Olga confront Pavel in the ruins of Irina’s ancestral home outside Saint Petersburg. The question is: will they survive?
With quiet assurance and a finely balanced sense of restraint, “The Bratinsky Affair” draws the reader into a world where private ambition and public history are inseparably entwined. From its opening pages in small-town Wicklow to its widening arc across Paris and the shadowed reaches of Cold War Europe, Jim Loughran crafts a narrative that is at once intimate and expansive, shaped as much by memory and inheritance as by murder, espionage, and political intrigue. At its heart lies a meditation on survival: how lives are bent by revolution, exile, loyalty, and the long reach of secrets that refuse to remain buried.
The novel’s early focus on Tom O’Brien establishes a deliberately modest beginning. A young journalist, newly qualified and restless, Tom enters the profession with dreams of foreign correspondence and heroic investigation, only to find himself recording council disputes and local scandals. Yet Loughran uses this narrow vantage point with care. Bray becomes a microcosm of unfinished history, where old alliances linger beneath polite surfaces, and reputations are shaped by conflicts long officially concluded. The gradual emergence of corruption within the auction trade is less a revelation than a quiet disturbance, a fissure in the ordinary that steadily widens. What distinguishes this opening is its patience. The story allows ambition, curiosity, and moral instinct to carry Tom forward, step by cautious step, into terrain he does not yet understand.
Running alongside this contemporary thread is the life of Countess Irina Bratinsky, and it is here that the novel reveals its deepest emotional register. Irina is introduced not as a mystery, but as a presence to be understood: elegant, controlled, alert to every shift of power in the rooms she inhabits. Her past unfolds slowly, shaped by revolution, exile, marriage, and the necessity of reinvention. Loughran writes her history with tenderness, allowing the reader to witness not only the public figure she becomes, but the young woman stepping over bodies in the streets of Saint Petersburg, the wife betrayed by a charming and ruinous husband, the mother who loses both authority and intimacy with her child. These passages establish the moral foundation of the novel. Irina’s later compromises and eventual entrapment in espionage emerge not as melodrama, but as the accumulated result of fear, loyalty, pride, and exhaustion.
One aspect that would clearly benefit from closer editorial attention is the manuscript’s technical finish, particularly at line level. While the storytelling itself is assured, the reading experience is repeatedly disrupted by words unintentionally joined together, typographical errors, and inconsistent or incorrect use of speech marks. These issues interrupt immersion at key moments and blunt the otherwise elegant rhythm of the prose. A thorough copy-edit would greatly enhance clarity and flow, allowing conversations to carry their full emotional weight and ensuring that the language supports, rather than interrupts, the novel’s considerable narrative authority.
One of the novel’s greatest strengths lies in its handling of power. Whether in Irish pubs, Parisian salons, intelligence offices, or police interrogation rooms, authority rarely announces itself through force. Instead, it moves through suggestion, obligation, leverage, and the slow tightening of circumstance. The diplomatic receptions and private suppers are especially finely observed. Here, conversation becomes currency, charm becomes surveillance, and every courtesy carries an invisible transaction. Loughran’s portrayal of the intelligence world is marked by restraint. The agents and intermediaries who drift through Irina’s life are neither flamboyant villains nor romantic figures, but patient, methodical professionals operating in a realm where loyalty is provisional and retirement a dangerous fantasy.
The inheritance strand centred on Olga Radcliffe forms a compelling bridge between past and present. Olga’s arrival among the ruins of her grandmother’s life marks a subtle shift in focus. Where Irina has spent decades concealing and managing history, Olga is forced to confront it without preparation. The discovery of wealth, documents, and artefacts brings not comfort but danger, and the investigation that follows becomes as much an enquiry into identity as into crime. The emergence of the Napoleon sword is handled with particular finesse. Rather than serving merely as a device to propel the narrative, it becomes a symbol of lineage, legitimacy, and the enduring power of history itself: who possesses it, who interprets it, and who is willing to kill to control it.
Tom’s evolution as a journalist is quietly persuasive. His growing confidence is tempered by caution, his ambition checked by an increasing awareness of consequence. The relationships around him — with his father, with Willi Regan, and eventually with Olga — anchor the thriller elements in recognisably human stakes. The bond between Tom and his father, John O’Brien, is especially effective, shaped by affection, restraint, and the unspoken weight of revolutionary memory. John’s past is neither romanticised nor dismissed. Instead, it hovers as a reminder that violence, once chosen or resisted, leaves long shadows over those who inherit its aftermath.
What ultimately gives “The Bratinsky Affair” its resonance is its moral intelligence. Loughran resists simple divisions of innocence and guilt. Nearly every central figure acts within constraints not of their own making. Survival requires compromise, and loyalty often demands silence. The novel’s treatment of espionage is especially subtle. Irina’s descent into reporting is neither heroic nor cowardly, but tragically comprehensible. Threatened with exposure, isolated by age, and haunted by loss, she chooses endurance over defiance, only to discover that endurance itself becomes captivity.
As the narrative gathers momentum towards Moscow and St Petersburg, the pace quickens, yet the novel never abandons its reflective core. Violence arrives abruptly and without glamour. Each death reverberates backwards through memory and forwards through consequence. The final movements of the story, drawing together journalism, inheritance, intelligence, and family history, achieve a rare balance between suspense and reflection. History presses close, yet the novel remains firmly rooted in the choices of individuals navigating forces far larger than themselves.
“The Bratinsky Affair” is a novel of quiet ambition and considerable depth. It is at once a thriller, a family chronicle, and a meditation on exile and the complexities of belonging. Rich in atmosphere, precise in its observation of power, and deeply compassionate towards its survivors, it offers a reading experience that is both absorbing and thoughtful. For readers who value historical fiction that honours complexity, moral ambiguity, and emotional truth, this novel offers a rich and compelling reading experience.
Review by Mary Anne Yarde
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Jim Loughran
Jim Loughran was born in Northern Ireland and studied French and Spanish at Queens University Belfast. Following graduation he spent a year in Paris before completing his Post Graduate Certificate in Education. Jim taught French in Belfast and then moved to Dublin where he worked for ten years as a Media Planner in one of Dublin’s leading advertising agencies. During this time he also got involved, on a voluntary basis, with Amnesty International and was Chairperson of Amnesty Ireland for five years. He then joined the organisation on a full-time basis as Development Manager before taking on the role of Head of Media. He initiated ground breaking research into Irish links to the arms trade and produced two major reports: “Ireland and the Arms Trade – Decoding the Deals” and “Claws of the Celtic Tiger.”
Jim was head hunted by Irish based international human rights organisation Front Line Defenders, which works world-wide on the security and protection of human rights defenders at risk, to take up the newly created role of Head of Media and Communications. Prior to his retirement he was responsible for setting up the Human Rights Defenders Memorial Project, a unique collaborative project involving leading national and international organisations to document the killings of human rights defenders. He was the author of ‘Stop the Killings’ a major report which analysed the patterns of violence that led to the killings of human rights defenders in: Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and the Philippines. These 6 countries collectively account for 80% of the killings of human rights defenders annually. He was jokingly referred to in the office as, ‘Head of Killings.’
Since he retired Jim has shifted his focus from writing press releases and opinion articles to historical fiction. His first published work, ‘Ill Met by Moonlight’ is a short story published in October 2025 by Briar Press, New York, as part of ‘These Dark Things,’ an anthology of 12 gothic short stories. His first novel, The Bratinsky Affair, was published in 2025 by Sharpe Books. He is currently working on his new novel 'Syracuse Must Burn' the first in a series of three set in the ancient city of Syracuse in 407BC.
Jim lives in Dublin with his husband.
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