Erast Fandorin mysteries

"[Akunin] writes gloriously pre-Soviet prose, sophisticated and suffused in Slavic melanchioly and thoroughly worthy of nineteenth-century forebearers like Gogol and Chekhov."
--Time

It is 1877, and war has broken out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The Bulgarian front resounds with the thunder of cavalry charges, the roar of artillery, and the clash of steel on steel during the world's last great horse-and-cannon conflict....

In 1882, after six years of foreign travel and adventure, renowned diplomat and detective Erast Fandorin returns to Moscow in the heart of Mother Russia. His Moscow homecoming is anything but peaceful. In the hotel where he and his loyal if impertinent manservant Masa are staying, Fandorin's old war-hero friend General Michel Sobolev ("Achilles" to the crowd) has been found dead, felled in his armchair by an apparent heart attack. But Fandorin suspects...

Moscow’s 19th century diplomat-detective Fandorin is on the run for murder in this ingenious historical mystery by “the Russian Ian Fleming” (Ruth Rendell).
 
Since the publication of The Winter Queen, a New York Times Notable Book, millions of readers have been enthralled by Erast Fandorin, “a devastatingly attractive combination of Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey and...