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Boris Akunin

Book Review: The Coronation by Boris Akunin

By Doreen Sheridan

February 13, 2019

In The Coronation, Boris Akunin’s seventh novel in the Erast Fandorin Mystery series, the Russian detective and his sidekick, Masa, investigate the kidnapping of a Grand Duke Georgii Alexandrovich’s four-year-old child at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II.  Matters are only made worse when the family receives the ransom request—an enormous diamond from a royal…

Book Review: The State Counsellor by Boris Akunin

By Doreen Sheridan

July 6, 2017

The State Counsellor by Boris Akunin is the sixth Erast Fandorin historical mystery—the first new Fandorin novel available to an American audience in a decade—which tests the handsome diplomat/detective’s guile and integrity like no mystery before. This riveting, deeply intelligent and empathetic mystery novel—though set in the Tsarist Russia of the late 1800s—offers significant insight…

The Armchair Detective: International Crime Fiction

By Jeannette de Beauvoir

May 19, 2016

Everyone tends to read about the familiar; I’m never as contented as when I am curled up with an English country-house murder mystery, for example. But, challenging yourself to trying something new could open up—literally—a whole new world. Just think about the places you could travel via mystery! From the remote stretches of the Arctic…

Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog by Boris Akunin

Give Us This Day, Our Daily Sleuth: Clerical Sleuths, Part 2

By Kerry Hammond

November 28, 2012

When it comes to law and order in mysteries, the first thing I think of are police officers and private detectives. However, there are a number of professions that amateur sleuths claim as day jobs; from crafters to retirees to little old ladies in St. Mary Mead.  One group of people who are out there…

Death on the Nile

Dead on the Water: Shipboard Murder Mysteries

By William I. Lengeman III

February 15, 2012

It’s probably not surprising that so much mystery fiction is set on cruise ships and similar vessels. This form of travel used to be the only game in town for going great distances across large bodies of water. Nowadays, people are less likely to travel this way out of necessity, but there’s a thriving cruise…

Film Poster for

You’re Not at All the Way I Pictured You, Devochka

By Leslie Gilbert Elman

May 29, 2011

I just finished reading The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin—not a cozy, but a historical mystery (which is just as good in my opinion) set in nineteenth-century Russia. It’s the first in a series of a dozen or so mysteries featuring the young police investigator Erast Petrovich Fandorin, five of which have been translated into…

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