In 1882, after six years of foreign travel and adventure, renowned diplomat and detective Erast Fandorin returns to Moscow, in the heart of Mother Russia. His homecoming is anything but peaceful. In the hotel where he and his loyal if impertinent manservant Masa are staying, Fandorin's old war-hero friend General Sobolev ("Achilles" to the crowd) has been found dead, felled in his armchair by an apparent heart attack. But Fandorin suspects an unnatural...

When someone bashes in the head of Manuila, the messianic leader of a rogue Jewish sect, aboard a steamboat on which Pelagia happens to be a passenger, her observations prove useful to the investigating officer. After several attempts on her life, she's shipped off to Palestine, where she continues to look for the truth behind Manuila's murder.

After five years spent abroad building up a business as something of a private investigator, the handsome, stuttering Fandorin is back in Moscow-and in for a case that entangles him with the highest echelons of Romanov royalty. Grand Duke Georgii Alexandrovich arrives in Moscow with three of his children for the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, who is fated to become the last Emperor of Russia. During an afternoon stroll in the park, Georgii's daughter...

Russia, 1891. The new governor-general of Siberia has been secreted away on a train from St. Petersburg to Moscow. A blizzard rages outside as a mustachioed official climbs aboard near the city; with his trademark stutter, he introduces himself as State Counsellor Erast Fandorin. He then thrusts a dagger inscribed with the initials CG into the governor-general's heart and, tearing off his mustache, escapes out the carriage window. The head of the...