Amazon Book Blurb:

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.

My Thoughts:

This is the first Fandorin novel I’ve read, the second to be published in English, they are a series of highly successful detective novels by Akunin, the pseudonym of Russian philologist Grigory Chkhartishvili. The first book apparently goes into the Fandorin’s personality far more than Leviathan does, I wish I’d read that first as I would have been able to paint in the blanks in Fandorin’s character here.
As events are told in a pastiche of classic Agatha Christie the viewpoint switches from one sub character to the next and it is through the eyes of these characters that we see Fandorin. This works if you already know Fandorin but it leaves him shallow and plain against the other characters when you don’t. I enjoyed reading Leviathan but not because of the main character. Read it, but ‘The Winter Queen’ first.

Leviathan

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