The Turkish Gambit: A Novel

“[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 fiancé–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.

BORIS AKUNIN is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, who was born in the republic of Georgia in 1956. A philologist, critic, essayist, and translator of Japanese, he published his first detective stories in 1998 and quickly became one of the most widely read authors in Russia. He has written eleven Erast Fandorin novels to date, which have sold more than eight million copies in Russia and been translated into nearly two dozen languages. He lives in Moscow.

ANDREW BROMFIELD was born in Hull in Yorkshire, England, and is the acclaimed translator of the stories and novels of Victor Pelevin. He also translated into English Boris Akunin’s first two Erast Fandorin mysteries, The Winter Queen and Murder on the Leviathan.