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The Turkish Gambit takes Erast Fandorin out of Moscow and into the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, where he is operating undercover and finding that the Russian command staff has a leak. The point-of-view character for most of the book is a young Russian woman, Varvara Suvorova, who arrives at the front to find her fiance and instead finds herself in the middle of a counter-intelligence problem she does not understand.
Akunin is having an enormous amount of fun here pastiching the great Russian war novels, with cameos and inside jokes that will reward anyone who has spent time with Tolstoy or with the late 19th century memoir literature. The mystery itself is solid. Varvara is a memorable narrator. The closing reveal involves a piece of misdirection I should have caught earlier than I did.
Four stars. As with Murder on the Leviathan, the formal exercise is part of the pleasure, and the series-level project of moving Fandorin through every late-19th-century setting Akunin can think of is in full swing.
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