Interesting. It felt like a very slow, thoughtful book, but a lot of things went by much too quickly -- Anton and Svetlana's courtship appears to have occurred entirely between sections one and two, for example, and really nobody except for Anton and Egor got much in the way of characterization. It was neat to have the mix of fantasy elements and complicated mysteries, though, and the mysteries all had great flourishing reveals as Anton figured them out (although I would have liked to have their emotional significances worked out for a little longer). There was a slightly old-fashioned feeling from having a vaguely Holmesian hero who won by being actually smart, not just clever and tough. Also, I was fascinated to read a story so grounded in Moscow and Russia, a setting very foreign to me. 
 I'm not hopping to read the sequels, though; the main point of the book seems to have been "how do you act truly good when the consequences of anything you do seem to be evil?", and there's only so far you can go with an answer like "um, I don't know".