It's dangerous for adults to believe in fairy tales....'Peter MacKenzie put a hex on his daughters,' they used to say in the village of Balvaig, 'he cursed them so they'd never find happiness in a man's bed. And there's his grand-daughter gone the same path.....'Serena MacKenzie is a successful TV journalist, based in Edinburgh, but she has never shaken off the obsessions that have gripped her since her childhood in the dysfunctional MacKenzie family of Balvaig: fairy tale heroes, all things Russian, and her grandparents' disapproval.It's 1997, and she's newly divorced. When a friend persuades her to join a cruise to St Petersburg, it seems just the treat she has told herself she deserves.Over the space of a few heady days in the queen of Baltic cities, she meets Russian musician Max Grigoriev and brings him home with her, illegally. He seems like the first man in years who really understands her.But Max has his own agenda, and life with him turns out to be anything but a fairy tale...