Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog

Boris Akunin

By his own admission, Bishop Mitrofanii has a passion for helping the police solve a mystery, and he has been credited with a number of successes. Mitrofanii is secretly proud of his reputation among the police, not just in his home town of Zavolzhak, but in other provinces and larger cities, too.He also has a second idle vanity known only to another person. I'm quite convinced that the other person is Sister Pelagia, a novice in the Bishop's Zavolzhak flock, his secret weapon in crime fighting.

Bishop Mitrofanii receives a letter from his extremely old aunt Marya Afanasievna about the poisoning of one of her prized bulldogs, asking him to come and help solve the mystery before the last two of this very special breed are dispatched which she could not bear to see die. The Bishop sends Sister Pelagia instead to be his eyes and ears and report on what she learns. What seems to be a simple case of inheritance turns complex very quickly.

Zavolzhak is a small town of about twenty-one thousand people, and in many ways it reminds me of the Russian version a Cabot Cove people keep dropping like flies in this small town. The mystery is harder edged than in Cabot Cove, though, with beheadings, charges of satanic worship, two attempts on Sister Pelagia's life, and assorted other evil in the province. The mystery is not solved until a dramatic confrontation during a court proceeding where both the Bishop and Sister Pelagia testify for the prosecution.

You don't get the 'sense of place' from this book as being Russia, largely because Akunin sets a discourse between the Bishop and the provincial Governor that allows him to create a more idyllic province than what we typically think of Russian history in this case a benign and enlightened government that results in a peaceful, law abiding, tax paying community. The contrast of the tragedy of the murders is pronounced, and it is startling to think how one or two devious (or deviants) in a small town can wreak such havoc.

Well worth the time, and I will be backtracking to locate earlier books in this series.