An interesting follow up to book one

As with the first one, while it took me a minute to get into the story, once I got into it a little bit, I was sucked in and had trouble putting it down. The characters were very well written, and I loved all the Russian folklore and history. The scenes were all written very vividly, in such a way that you felt you were there. My only issues were kind of the same that I'd had with the first book in the series. The fact that there would be more than one name for the same person, and sometimes that was confusing as to who was being talked to. Or who was doing the talking. And then, there was a character that said his house name or his name or something was ironic, but even after googling the name, I could not find what reason made it that - Bashnya Kostei? If you can figure it out, I'd love to know. Anyway, I'll definitely be interested to see what the final book includes.