М. Борисов: The Vesuvius Club

Meet Lucifer Box: Equal parts James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, with a twist of Monty Python and a dash of Austin Powers, Lucifer has a charming countenance and rapier wit that make him the guest all hostesses must have. And most do.

But few of his conquests know that Lucifer is also His Majesty s most daring secret agent, at home in both London s Imperial grandeur and in its underworld of despicable vice. So when Britain s most prominent scientists begin turning up dead, there is only one man his country can turn to for help.

Following a dinnertime assassination, Lucifer is dispatched to uncover the whereabouts of missing agent Jocelyn Poop. Along the way he will give art lessons, be attacked by a poisonous centipede, bed a few choice specimens, and travel to Italy on business and pleasure. Aided by his henchwoman Delilah, the beautiful, mysterious, and Dutch Miss Bella Pok, his boss, a dwarf who takes meetings in a lavatory, grizzled vulcanologist Emmanuel Quibble, and the impertinent, delicious, right-hand-boy Charlie Jackpot, Lucifer Box deduces and seduces his way from his elegant townhouse at Number 9 Downing Street (somebody has to live there) to the ruined city of Pompeii, to infiltrate a highly dangerous secret society that may hold the fate of the world in its clawlike grip-the Vesuvius Club.