Chicago Sun-Times: Call it 'American roulette'

A handsome young man strolls up to a young girl and her chaperone as they sit on a bench in a Moscow park, comments on the girl's beauty and asks for a kiss. When the chaperone sharply rebuffs him, the fellow takes out a gun and shoots himself in the head.

Suicide? Likely. But maybe he was indulging in that new game called "American roulette," where the cylinder contains a single bullet, says the detective superintendent. Clearly, Boris Akunin's Winter Queen (Random House, $12.95) is a Russian novel, but the American reader will love Akunin's magnificent plotting and his detective, Erast Fandorin.

Fandorin, the orphaned only child of a failed aristocrat, is at the bottom of the bureaucratic pecking order in czarist Russia, a young innocent three weeks on the job in May 1876, when the strange shooting occurs. But unlike his bosses, Fandorin doubts the man intended to shoot himself. His boss, the detective superintendent, out of boredom and fondness, indulges his new man and permits him to interview witnesses.

On his first day out, Fandorin learns about another young man from a shopkeeper who told police he saw the pimply-faced university student aiming a gun at his head the same day as the reputed suicide. And upon questioning, the chaperone also recalls seeing this young man, hovering in the background just before the shooting. During this interview, Fandorin meets her beautiful young charge and is smitten.

That meeting will eventually lead to a proposal of marriage, but in the meantime there's police work to be done. In tracking down the university student, Fandorin finds himself among a dozen or so attentive males at the home of an imperious, stunningly seductive woman who apparently holds nightly gatherings with her admirers.

Afterward, Fantorin, trying to sort out the growing number of players in this mystery, is questioning the university student when an assassin steps out and kills the student and seriously wounds the detective.

That incident piques the interest of important people in St. Petersburg who send a hotshot investigator to replace Fandorin's boss. And so the plot thickens and thickens, taking on an international tinge as Fandorin's instincts keep leading him deeper into a conspiracy that none of his betters wants to acknowledge.

The conspiracy itself is truly strange, having nothing to do with the various revolutionaries of that era fomenting revolt against the czars. To tell more would take away the fun. But let it be said The Winter Queen contains love, lust, mayhem, cunning, betrayal, fractured innocence and an ending for which to save a handkerchief.

Signal and Noise, by John Griesemer (Picador, $15). Set in mid- 19th century London, this novel re-creates the era and the people involved in laying the first trans-Atlantic cable to carry telegraph messages between America and Europe.

Almost There, by Nuala O'Faolain (Riverhead, $14). O'Faolain, who wrote about her youth and young adulthood in a memoir and a later novel, takes up her middle years in this second memoir.

Dark Star Safari, by Paul Theroux (Mariner, $15). Theroux, a novelist and travel writer, records his observations in traveling overland in Africa from Cairo to Cape Town. In his typical fashion, Theroux is entertaining, vastly informative and sharply opinionated.

Only the Strong Survive, by Jerry Butler with Earl Smith (Indiana University Press, $18.95). Soul singer and Cook County Commissioner Jerry "The Iceman" Butler reminisces in this memoir about his careers and the performers and politicians he met along the way.

MASS MARKETS: The Footprints of God, by Greg Iles (Pocket, $7.99), a science fiction thriller about the building of a supercomputer that could destroy mankind; Dirty Little Lies, by Connie Lane (Dell, $6.50), a romance featuring an FBI agent exiled to Kansas, where he investigates the attempted abduction of a dazzling lass; Riding Lessons, by Sara Gruen (Harper Torch, $6.99), a novel about a woman who returns to her family's horse farm, where her promising career in horsemanship ended in a tragic fall during her teens; All the Way to Berlin, by James Megellas (Ballantine, $7.50), a memoir of World War II by the most decorated officer in the 82nd Airborne Division.