Nicholas Fandorin is the protagonist of four novels by Boris Akunin, subtitled Приключения магистра ("Adventures of the magister [viz., the MA])".
His father was Alexander Fandorin (1920–1994), born in British exile where his pregnant mother had fled from the Russian Civil War.
Nicholas has a master's degree in history, specializing in the 19th century history of the Russian Empire, and (in Altyn Tolobas) visits the land of his ancestors for the first time in 1995, after the fall of the Soviet Union, tracing the founder of the Russian Fandorins, a Swabian musketeer Cornelius von Dorn who took service with the Tsar in 1675, and died in the 1682 Moscow uprising, nine generations removed from Nicholas.
As in the preceding novel, Nicholas' current-day adventures are told in parallel with the story of one of his ancestors, in this case Daniel Vondorin Mithridates Karpov (Samson Vondorin), the 4th and 5th Fandorins after Cornelius, set in the final year of the reign (and life) of Catherine the Great.
Nicholas Fandorin, at the height of the financial crisis of 2009, travels on the Atlantic in the luxury cruise liner Falcon.