La maîtresse de la mort – Boris Akunin

Drawn to the city by a young boy she has met, a young girl of a romantic nature renames herself Columbine and travels to Moscow from the provinces to create a new life for herself. Although her Harlequin turns out to be a disappointment, he introduces her into a secretive group that the whole of the capital is talking about - the Lovers of Death, a small group of sensitive poets, each of them eagerly waiting their turn to die a romantic fin-de-siècle death by suicide. The close proximity with Death inspires them to create fine poetry until the moment that Death judges them as being worthy of being called to be her lover.

The sudden rise of incidents of suicide, the victims leaving behind a final flourish of a poem as a suicide note, hasn’t gone unnoticed by the newspapers or by the authorities, each of whom try to infiltrate the group, fearing that the epidemic will spread and inspire others to end their lives. Following the calling of another one of their number to the other side, the leader of the group, the Doge, introduces a new applicant into the Lovers of Death group - a distinguished gentleman with a Japanese servant who it would seem has already had a close encounter with the Death in the past.

She-Lover of Death has everything you expect now from an Akunin Fandorin mystery, taking in questions about the nature of the Russian people and their temperament with literary allusions - here evidently the romantic early deaths of its greatest poets Pushkin and Lermontov - philosophical musings and considerations of advances in technology that all have a profound impact on Russian society at the turn-of-the-century. Fandorin’s investigation is as usual followed from a number of perspectives; newspaper reports, an official investigation and from the diary entries of a romantic young girl, all of them adding up to the usual pulp thrills, spills and humour with a characteristically dark edge.