Murder on the Leviathan

Yesterday, I did something I haven't done for a while (barring Potter of course). I read a fiction book. In fact I read it from start to end. And it was a book translated into English from Russian. I'm practically an intellectual!

The book in question was Murder on the Leviathan and it was really rather great. I have a bit of a soft spot for quirky crime stories - somehow in my sleep-adled state 10 days post Toby I read The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear over a couple of days - but this was the first time I'd actively seeked out a book at the library that I'd been tempted by in Waterstones.

If you're interested, the premise is as follows:

  In Boris Akunin's Murder on the Leviathan the former St Petersburg investigator Erast Fandorin (hero of The Winter Queen) competes for centre stage with a swell-headed French police commissioner, a crafty adventuress boasting more than her fair share of aliases, and a luxurious steamship that appears fated for deliberate destruction in the Indian Ocean.

Following the 1878 murders of British aristocrat Lord Littleby and his servants on Paris's fashionable Rue de Grenelle, Gustave Gauche, "Investigator for Especially Important Crimes," boards the double-engined, six-masted Leviathan on its maiden voyage from England to India. He's on the lookout for first-class passengers missing their specially made gold whale badges--one of which Littleby had yanked from his attacker before he died. However, this trap fails: several travellers are badgeless, and still others make equally good candidates for Littleby's slayer, including a demented baronet, a dubious Japanese army officer, a pregnant and loquacious Swiss banker's wife, and a suave Russian diplomat headed for Japan. That last is of course Fandorin, still recovering two years later from the events related in The Winter Queen. Like a lesser Hercule Poirot, "papa" Gauche grills these suspects, all of whom harbour secrets, and occasionally lays blame for Paris's "crime of the century" before one or another of them--only to have the hyper-perceptive Fandorin deflate his arguments. It takes many leagues of ocean, several more deaths, and a superfluity of overlong recollections by the shipmates before a solution to this twisted case emerges from the facts of Littleby's killing and the concurrent theft of a valuable Indian artefact from his mansion.

It had all the plot twists and turns I could have wanted - not to give too much away but the inclusion of the pregnant woman was a stroke of genius - and I shall be seeking out some more Erast Fandorin books, and some other stuff by Boris Akunin. If you want to read Murder on the Leviathan it should be back in Brighton Library by tomorrow if nowhere else :)

I quite fancy Skulduggery Pleasant next,  but as it's out in paperbook early next month I'll probably find another book or two to fill my time and buy it on the 3rd.