Erast Fandorin Mysteries Reading Order
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Winter Queen | 1998 | Buy |
| The Turkish Gambit | 1998 | Buy |
| Murder on the Leviathan / Leviathan | 1998 | Buy |
| The Death of Achilles | 1998 | Buy |
| The Jack of Spades | 2007 | Buy |
| The State Counsellor | 2008 | Buy |
| The Coronation | 2009 | Buy |
| She Lover of Death | 2009 | Buy |
| He Lover of Death | 2010 | Buy |
| The Diamond Chariot | 2011 | Buy |
| All The World’s a Stage | 2017 | Buy |
| Black City | 2018 | Buy |
| Not Saying Goodbye | 2019 | Buy |
| Just Masa | 2020 | N/A |
| Pit | 2023 | N/A |
| Special Assignmentsis the compilation of two separate novellas,The Jack of SpadesandThe Decorator, and they are listed individually above. | - | N/A |
The name “Erast Fandorin” on this page refers to the fictional detective at the center of a celebrated series of historical mysteries by Boris Akunin, the pen name of Georgian-Russian author Grigory Chkhartishvili. Akunin began the series in 1998 with The Winter Queen and has continued it into the 2020s. The series is one of the most commercially and critically successful works of Russian popular fiction of the past three decades.
Fandorin is a Russian investigator whose career begins in the 1870s and continues through the revolutionary period of the early twentieth century. Each novel places him in a different historical setting or crisis point in Russian and world history: the Ottoman Empire, revolutionary politics, the Russo-Japanese War, and the upheavals that preceded 1917. Akunin uses the detective genre as a framework for exploring Russian history and identity, and the books have been praised for their historical research alongside their plotting.
Akunin has also written companion series following other characters in the same historical world, but Fandorin is the central figure and the starting point for readers new to the series. The books have been widely translated and were adapted for Russian film and television. The Winter Queen is the first and most widely read entry.