Book Review - Special Assignments

I was a bit nervous about reading this book, as it was my selection for our book club. Would my first turn at choosing a book turn out to be a disaster? I've never really been into crime novels, and I'd never come across the author - Boris Akunin - before, either.

"Special Assignments - the further adventures of Erast Fandorin" is set in Moscow during the late 1800's. Fandorin is a quite a fascinating, but aloof, character: a creative yet methodical thinker with a flair for the dramatic. Perhaps his greatest asset is the way he utilises intuition and psychology to get into the mind of his quarry and predict their future moves.

The two novellas that make up the book are quite different in nature. The first, "The Jack of Spades" is an almost light-hearted contest between the notorious conman Momos and Erast. The second story has a much darker plot, as Erast and his assistant Anisii Tulipov race the clock to stop a series of gruesome murders.

I won't give any of the story away, so I'll simply say that I enjoyed the book. It was good to have the different "flavours" of stories together in the one book, as it probably would have been either too heavy or too light if the stories were separate. I found the characters fairly engaging, more particularly that of Anisii Tulipov. We learnt much more about him as a person and in terms of having a window into his thoughts and perspectives and also his life story. Erast remains something of an enigma. While most readers probably admired Erast, they would care more about Anisii.

The insights into the criminal minds in both stories could probably lead to some interesting discussions about human nature and what it is that makes us who we are. We might go a little way down that track at book club!