Just when you think you know what’s coming next, Akunin, the most audacious author of historical mysteries (The State...
Finally, it can be told: the highly fictitious story of how an audacious criminal who did his level best to disrupt the coronation of Czar Nicholas II in 1896 was foiled by perennial agent Erast Petrovich Fandorin.
When Nicholas’ uncle Georgii Alexandrovich Romanov and his family arrive at the Small Hermitage in Moscow’s Neskuchny Park in preparation for the coronation, the family’s butler, Afanasii Stepanovich Ziukin, thinks his biggest problem will be deciding how to fit the whole household into a mere 18 rooms. More serious trouble promptly arrives during Afanasii’s walk around the grounds with Georgii’s daughter, 19-year-old Xenia Georgievna, and his youngest son, Mikhail Georgievich, 6, when they’re attacked by a gang of brigands obviously intent on abducting Xenia Georgievna. The girl is rescued by the unexpected and muscular intervention of Fandorin and his valet, Masa, but the kidnappers get away with Mikhail. A suavely menacing letter from Doctor Lind, a pseudonymous supercriminal whose activities Fandorin has long been familiar with, demands an outrageous ransom: the Orlov, the largest diamond in the royal scepter. Since the absence of the stone would surely be noticed during the coronation, plunging the dynasty into unfathomable chaos, Fandorin proposes paying Doctor Lind a series of lesser ransoms every day for a week in hopes of gathering more information about his operation in the meantime. Lind accepts the plan, and the game of cat and mouse is on between two world-class antagonists who are both clever, resourceful, and well-stocked with backup plans. Fandorin recruits the butler and Emilie Declique, Mikhail’s governess, to help him foil Lind’s plot. But Lind has many more accomplices and no scruples about killing anyone who stands in his way. Nor is he distracted, as Afanasii is dismayed to see Fandorin is, by an utterly inappropriate attraction to Xenia Georgievna.
Just when you think you know what’s coming next, Akunin, the most audacious author of historical mysteries (The State Counsellor, 2017, etc.) in the business, shows that he’s way ahead of you. Like-minded readers who can get past all those royal patronymics are in for a treat.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2781-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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