Good evening. So pleased you could join us. No, don't bother with the door, I can assure you it's securely locked. The windows too. Really, it's quite useless to struggle. Let's try to conduct ourselves in a civilized fashion, shall we? Sherry? We're here to discuss mystery novels. As we both know, there are ominously looming mountains of them, and you don't want to waste your precious beach reading time with books that are doomed to bore, do you? Here instead are six of this summer's most tightly wound, delicately nuanced and deviously irresistible. Settle in and prepare to enjoy yourself. I'm afraid escape is quite impossible.
--THE WINTER QUEEN, by Boris Akunin (Random House; 244 pages)
On a warm spring morning in 1876, A well-dressed young man accosts a pretty young woman out walking with her governess in a public garden in Moscow. When she rebuffs him, he whips out a revolver, spins the cylinder and blows his own head off. It's a barbaric practice, we learn, that's known in Russia as American roulette.
That mixture of the grisly and the lighthearted is characteristic of Boris Akunin, who in Russia is roughly the counterpart of John Grisham but is virtually unknown here in the benighted Western world. (Akunin is actually the pen name of a respected Georgian academic, Grigory Chkhartishvili. Don't worry, no one in Russia can pronounce it either.) The case of the suicidal swain lands in the lap of a fresh-faced, foppish but surprisingly resourceful young detective named Erast Fandorin, who quickly becomes swept up in a glamorous whirl of moneyed expatriates and gambling, champagne-guzzling aristocrats. You'll understand right away what the Russians see in Akunin: he writes gloriously pre-Soviet prose, sophisticated and suffused in Slavic melancholy and thoroughly worthy of 19th century forebears like Gogol and Chekhov. The Winter Queen is as delicate and elegant as a Faberge egg, and, thank the Czars, we still have nine more untranslated Fandorin mysteries to look forward to.
--FEAR ITSELF, by Walter Mosley (Little, Brown; 316 pages)
Fear Itself is subtitled A Fearless Jones Novel, but the narrator-hero is actually a brainy and somewhat wimpy bookstore owner named Paris Minton. "I'm a small man," he tells us. "I've been chased, caught, and beaten by big-boned women." Fearless Jones, it turns out, is Paris' best friend and polar opposite: superhumanly strong, infernally lucky, ridiculously handsome and very, very good at beating people up. You might say Paris plays Watson to Fearless's Sherlock Holmes, if Holmes had been a jock instead of a nerd.