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 Masha Mironova alights in Moscow at the turn of the century, with a modest inheritance and a determination to shed her provincial Siberian upbringing, she becomes Columbine: reckless and daring-and with the dramatic outfits to prove it. In her quest for danger and passion, Columbine soon discovers the Lovers of Death-a small gathering of poets who conduct séances to determine death's next chosen lover. Once named at a séance, the chosen one...