The Turkish Gambit

[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. Amid the treacherous atmosphere of a nineteenth-century Russian field army, former diplomat and detective extraordinaire Erast Fandorin finds his most confounding case. It's difficulties are only compounded by the presence of Varya Suvorova, a deadly serious (and seriously beautiful) woman with revolutionary ideals who has disguised herself as a boy in order to find her respected comrade- and fiance-Pyotr Yablokov, an army cryptographer. Even after Fandorin saves her life, Varya can hardly bear to thank such a lackey of the throne for his efforts. But when Yablokov is accused of espionage and faces imprisonment and execution, Varya must turn to Fandorin to find the real culprit . . . a mission that forces her to reconsider his courage, deductive mind, and piercing gaze. Filled with the same delicious detail, ingenious plotting, and subtle satire as The Winter Queen and Murder on the Leviathan, The Turkish Gambit confirms Boris Akunin's status as a master of the historical thriller-and Erast Fandorin as a detective for the ages. From the Hardcover edition.…