The Death of Achilles: Book summary and reviews of The Death of Achilles by Boris Akunin

The Death of Achilles Summary

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 Moscow 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 Michel Sobolev ("Achilles" to the crowd) has been found dead, felled in his armchair by an apparent heart attack. But Fandorin suspects an unnatural cause. His suspicions lead him to the boudoir of the beautiful singer - "not exactly a courtesan" - known as Wanda. Apparently, in Wanda's bed, the general secretly breathed his last. . . .

The Death of Achilles Reviews

"An exciting resolution only partly offsets this incongruity (that the novel consists of two parts that read like two separate books)." - Publishers Weekly
"Akunin also pauses long enough for nods to Gogol, Conan Doyle and The Pink Panther. This time, however, the author's trademark playfulness is subordinated to a relatively sober account that makes this the most straightforward, even conventional, of Fandorin's adventures." - Kirkus Reviews.

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Boris Akunin Author Biography

Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, who was born in the republic of Georgia in 1956; he is a philologist, critic, essayist, and translator of Japanese. He published his first detective stories in 1998 and in a very short time has become one of the most widely read authors in Russia. Akunin enjoys almost legendary popularity in Russia. He lives in Moscow where he writes both his Erast Fandorin series and the newer Sister Pelagia series.

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