The State Counsellor

April 10, 2017
Set in 1891, Akunin’s delightfully convoluted sixth Fandorin mystery (after 2008’s Special Assignments) brings to life the internecine squabbles among Moscow’s multiple police forces as well as the nihilist revolutionaries whom they seek to foil. During a blizzard outside Moscow, Adjutant General Khrapov, governor general of Siberia, is murdered by a man claiming to be State Counsellor Erast Fandorin. The real Fandorin, who’s quickly exonerated, is keen to find the impostor, a member of the Combat Group, a dangerous revolutionary organization. Only a few men, all police officials in some capacity, apparently had knowledge of the arrangements for Khrapov’s transportation and protection. To further complicate matters, the czar’s own deputy director of police arrives from St. Petersburg to take the reins of the investigation. Akunin’s descriptions of characters’ appearances and temperaments, as well as the time period, call to mind Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures. Narrative sleights of hand and copious red herrings will keep readers guessing until the end. Agent: Ann Rittenberg, Ann Rittenberg Literary Agency.

May 15, 2017

Though a British translation appeared in 2009, this first American edition is a welcome revival of Russia's premier detective, Erast Fandorin. The sixth in the series of 14 historical mysteries, it's set in 1891 and highlights a terrorist cell in the heart of Moscow led by a man of steel named Green. Fandorin, who's competing with another blue-blooded police official to be the tsar's right hand, has to solve the first murder in the killing spree for which Fandorin himself had been framed. Four ladies of mystery add spicy complexity to a plot in which iron will must rule over emotions. The historical flourishes imbue the plot, from details as tiny as an assassin's shoe style to the visage of the grand duke who takes over the antiterrorist portfolio. Evocative of our own age of political turmoil, this exploration of how terror worked back in the 1890s stars men and women pushed by conviction and ambition to wage war on the tsarist system or to support it to the death. VERDICT Readers of Sam Eastland's "Inspector Pekkala" series set just a few decades later in Russian history will embrace Fandorin as a similarly honorable hero. Let's hope for more U.S. editions of works by an author who is popular worldwide for his "Nicholas Fandorin" and "Sister Pelagia" books. [Library marketing.]--Barbara Conaty, Falls Church, VA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2017
Originally published in Russia in 1999 and in Great Britain in 2008, this Erast Fandorin novel is finally available to North American readers. Fandorin is a nineteenth-century Russian detective (his title is state counsellor). This is the seventh novel in the series, and it begins with a shocker: Fandorin is arrested for murdering the newly appointed governor-general of Siberia. But soon enough Fandorin proves he's been framed and is hot on the trail of the Combat Group, a bunch of radical political terrorists. He's distressed, if not entirely surprised, to encounter corruption in the government as he pursues the faceless people behind the Combat Group. This rousing historical mystery, fluidly translated from the Russian by Bromfield, continues to draw its appeal from the Holmes-like Fandorin and from the author's antic stylistic flourishes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)