 Erast Fandorin, a government clerk turned detective, makes for an unlikely but gifted sleuth in late nineteenth-century Russia. The action opens a few years before the assassination of Czar Alexander II which begins the dark slide to war and revolution. A rich young man has killed himself in Moscow s Alexander Gardens, having spun a single cartridge in a revolver s chamber, pulled the trigger and lost at a game said to have been thought up in the Klondike gold fields and therefore called American roulette. The suicide note ostensibly explains the young man s motive: "Your world nauseates me, and that, truly, is quite reason enough." He has left his fortune to Baroness Margaret Astair, a British educator famed for her world-wide organization of progressive orphanages, which will shift the action for a time to England.