The Winter Queen

The Winter Queen is a historical detective novel by the Russian writer Boris Akunin, the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, published in Russian in 1998 under the title Azazel and carrying the subtitle A Conspiracy Novel. It is the first installment in Akunin's Erast Fandorin series, conceived as the opening novel of an ambitious project exploring different subgenres of detective fiction one book at a time, and introduces the young detective Erast Fandorin in Imperial Russia. Though modestly received on its initial release, selling only a few thousand copies, the Fandorin series that followed became a bestselling and critically praised pillar of contemporary Russian popular fiction, with The Winter Queen itself translated into English by Andrew Bromfield and published internationally by houses including Weidenfeld and Nicolson and Random House.