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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
