Special Assignments

Erast Fandorin, Boris Akunin's impossibly competent 19th century Russian detective, has spent the early books in the series working through a deliberate genre tour. Special Assignments collects two novellas in two different modes: a comic con-man caper and a darker Ripper-style stalker case, both set in 1880s and 1890s Moscow.

Akunin treats each form with the kind of formal precision that you only get from a writer in love with the conventions. The con-man story is structured as a series of escalating swindles. The serial-killer novella draws explicitly from the Whitechapel investigations and reads, in places, like Akunin is showing the receipts.

The trick of the Fandorin books is that the pastiche is so studied it feels original. The translation by Andrew Bromfield is excellent. Four stars, and a recommendation that you read the series roughly in order to get the full effect of the gear shifts.