Treasure in Roubles

Mark Treasure, British merchant banker and occasional sleuth (Murder in Advent, is up to his urbane neck in another well-crafted mystery. Treasure's actress wife Molly persuades him to join a package tour of her art club on a long weekend in Leningrad. The dozen other tour members are a rum lot, but at the Kirov Opera one of the tourists is spectacularly murdered. Soon Treasure has joined forces with dogged, dour KGB Colonel Grinyev as they work on solving the murder and the secret, ingenious theft of a small Raphael masterpiece from the Hermitage. Other elements include possible amorous hanky-panky, a revealing look at Soviet blat, an almost genteel system of influence-peddling. Back in England, one of Treasure's employees, humorously inept Peregrine Gore, works an able trick or two in helping to crack the case. Before the satisfying solution, we're treated to some nice British-Upper mots: ""Fred's'' is ``what the rich call Fortnum and Mason's.'' (August 17)