What does one expect from Russian fiction? Existential gloom? Bitter political satire? Probably not tongue-in-cheek historical thrillers, but Boris Akunin has written a series of novels set in Tsarist Russia in the 1870s and featuring Erast Fandorin, a naive young police investigator. The Winter Queen is the first to be published in English. While Akunin is eager to advertise the authenticity of the historical backdrop to his story, he refuses resolutely to take the improbable twists and turns of his plot too seriously. Beginning dramatically with a public suicide in a Moscow park, the story propels the idealistic Fandorin into the company of enigmatic and beautiful women, devious conspirators and a most unlikely Svengali intent on world domination. He is sent to London and there uncovers what he believes to be treachery on an epic scale. Hastening back to Russia, he finds that he has got everything upside down and back to front and has been pursuing the wrong quarry. In a breathless denouement Fandorin does finally defeat the forces arrayed against him but loses the person he most loves in the process. This may not be what we expect from Russian fiction, but it's all very fast-moving and enjoyable.
