Innovative advertising campaign for new thriller Man of Bones uses Stalin’s own bloody fingerprints to link the Russian dictator to his monstrous crimes

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, May 23, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- As history’s serial killers go, Joseph Stalin put Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Jack the Ripper to shame. Although estimates vary, most modern historians place Stalin’s victims – from the Gulag camps, his Great Terror, and the Holodomor – the brutal famine in which millions of Ukrainians starved to death – in the many millions.

Now, a hard-hitting advertising campaign for new historical thriller Man of Bones by Ben Creed (Mountain Leopard Press), places the communist dictator’s bloodied fingerprints at the scene of those despicable crimes.

Using exact copies of Stalin’s own prints from his 1910 Baku arrest record by the Okhrana, the Czar’s secret police, the campaign links them to the victims of the Gulag, Great Terror, and the Ukrainian Holodomor.

The atmospheric sixty-second book-trailers will appear on social platforms like X, Instagram and Tik Tok to help publicise the launch of Man of Bones by Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger shortlisted author and writer of one of The Times ‘Thrillers of the Year,’ Ben Creed.

Man of Bones is the third book in the series of critically acclaimed historical thrillers by Creed. Like the first two – City of Ghosts and A Traitor’s Heart – the novel is set in the Russia of the early 1950s, during the tumultuous years leading up to Stalin’s death.

The books tell the story of militia detective Revol Rossel, a former violin student at the prestigious Leningrad Conservatory, whose musical career is cut short when his fingers are severed by the state-security service, the fearsome MGB.

Rossel, a meditative but hard-headed detective, has been compared by The Times and Financial Times to Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko. Bestselling author James Patterson agrees: “This reminded me of Gorky Park, only I liked this tense complex thriller even better,” the thriller writer commented on City of Ghosts.

“Stalin’s malign presence pervades all the Revol Rossel thrillers. He is the heart of the darkness inside the Soviet system which took so many innocent lives. So, we wanted to create a different kind of book-trailer for Man of Bones, one that clearly links Stalin to his monstrous crimes,” said Ben Creed.

Unusually, Ben Creed is the nom de plume for two writers working together: Chris Rickaby and Barney Thompson. Rickaby found his way into advertising as a copywriter and, after working for various agencies, started his own. Thompson was a journalist for the Times and Financial Times and now works as an editor and writer. Before all that, he studied music under the legendary conducting professor Ilya Musin at the St Petersburg Conservatory.

Man of Bones is published by Headline’s Mountain Leopard Press and is out now in hardback and on Amazon Kindle.

Chris Rickaby
Chris Rickaby (Ben Creed)
chrisrickaby1@googlemail.com
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Man of Bones Booktrailer 'TERROR'