Murder on the Leviathan: Erast Fandorin 3

Boris Akunin

Aug 2010 · Hachette UK

About this ebook

The third Erast Fandorin mystery from Boris Akunin, shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger.

'Akunin is an outstanding novelist...Fandorin is a beautifully drawn character who more than lives up to comparisons with Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes...The characters are delightful and you can imagine them in a Woody Allen version of an Agatha Christie novel...Akunin's work is gloriously tongue-in-cheek but seriously edge-of-your-seat at the same time' Daily Express

On 15th March 1878 Lord Littleby, an English eccentric and collector, is found murdered in his Paris house together with nine members of his staff. A gold whale in the victim's hand leads Erast Fandorin to board the Leviathan, the world's largest steamship, as the murderer is one of the 142 first class passengers.

Commissioner Gauche of the French police has narrowed down the suspects to ten, and they are forced to eat together at every meal time in the ship's Windsor Suite until 'the Crime of the Century' is solved. But is the murderer really at the table, and can Erast Fandorin discover his or her identity before Gauche? As more passengers are murdered and the Leviathan heads towards Calcutta, Fandorin needs all his investigative skills to find the truth.

Ratings and reviews

The "crime of the century" has been committed in Paris, France: Ten people where killed in the house of the rich collector of Indian artifacts, with the collector, and there were two things stolen: a golden statue of an Indian god, and a shawl, in which the statue was supposedly wrapped by the murderer. The French police puts an old French inspector, M. Gauche, to find the crimes-person. Though the murderer/robber was very careful, he did leave a clue: A golden whale pin that was given to every first-class passenger with the ticket before boarding the new ship Leviathan, that was also torn from the murder's shirt by the collector before he died, and was left in the dead man's hand. M. Gauche buys a ticket for the first class, and as soon as he gets on board, searches for the first-class passengers without the pin. He found ten people, with one that did not really count as the passenger with a missing golden pin, Erast Petrovich Fandorin, a Russian diplomat, who kept the pin in his pocket. Erast has solved other mysteries (read The Winter Queen and Turkish Gambit) and has stumbled on this crime. Erast has very nice logical chains, but will those chains help him solve the crime of the century? And who and why would want to kill a rich collector for a statue and a shawl? Read the book to find out! I personally read the book in Russian (since I am Russian) and I don't know how it is in English, but Boris Akunin makes every single step in this book so tied together and so mysterious, that I had to force myself not to stay up until 1:00 am. Now I am on the fourth book, but this one so far is my favorite compared to the other Adventures of Erast Fandorin.

About the author

BORIS AKUNIN is the pseudonym of Grigory Chkhartishvili.
He has been compared to Gogol, Tolstoy and Arthur Conan Doyle, and his Erast Fandorin books have sold over forty million copies around the world.
He lives in London.