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Altyn Tolobas features a new Akunin character, Nicholas Fandorin, the modern-day English great-grandson of the famous detective Erast Fandorin. A distinguished English historian, the news of the discovery of a piece of parchment brings Nicholas back to his ancestral homeland of Moscow on a personal investigation. The document appears to be the other half of a will he has in his possession written by one of his ancestors - Cornelius von Dorn who started the Russian line of the family - and Nicholas hopes that piecing the complete document together will reveal some great secrets in his family’s past. He no sooner sets foot in Russia however than he is involved in a lot of trouble. A powerful figure in the Russian mafia is also interested in the contents of the document, and Nicholas finds himself pursued around Moscow by a deadly assassin. Nicholas’s story is mirrored to some extent in alternate chapters by the story of his ancestor and founder of the family’s Russian branch of the fami

Law is back at the centre of Mark Gimenez’s latest novel, when Chicago lawyer Beck Hardin packs up his career after the death of his wife and moves back home with his kids to small town life in Texas. A lot has changed in the twenty-four years since he left, and when Beck finds himself appointed judge of Friedericksburg, a small town founded on old German values, he runs up against the town’s elders and their inability to deal with modern issues of race, land and politics. The whole corrupt set-up is exposed through two main cases - a violent race attack by the town’s high-school sports star on a young Mexican boy, and the unsolved death of a sixteen year-old beauty queen, the daughter of an old friend of Beck’s. Despite the shock opening prologue – rather hastily described, but certainly achieving an immediate impact – The Perk settles down into an entirely different kind of pace from the high-octane action-movie machismo of Gimenez’s previous novel The Abduction . The more mundane e