Russian Scholar to Write Biography of Tsarnaev Brothers

Most recently wrote book about Putin

Brothers and Boston Marathon bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be the focus of a major new biography by Russian American scholar and journalist Masha Gessen. Riverhead will publish the as-yet-untitled book.

Gessen is the author, most recently, of "The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin." Like the Tsarnaevs, she moved to the Boston area when she was a Russian-speaking teen; she returned to Russia in her 20s to live and work there.

As a journalist, she covered the war in Chechnya, the Tsarnaevs' country of origin. Her publisher tells The Times that her work has included years of building contacts and networks in Dagestan, where the Tsarnaev family lived before coming to the U.S.