Akunin Boris. Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel

Sister Pelagia is the heroine of a trilogy of mystery novels by Boris Akunin.Sister Pelagia is a Russian Orthodox nun, acting as a girls' school teacher in the provincial town of Zavolzhsk on the left bank of the Volga in Imperial Russia (a fictitious town, which nevertheless takes its name from a real town in the modern Ivanovo Oblast, established 1934). No dates are given, but references to Sherlock Holmes, The Kreutzer Sonata, the Olympics and Marie Curie make it clear that the action is set in the late 1890s or in the early 1900s.Sister Pelagia has an exceptional talent for deduction and acts under the orders of Bishop Mitrofanii of Zavolzhsk. The Bishop possesses a father-daughter relationship with Pelagia, which causes the two to often argue in a good natured manner. The Crown Prosecutor, an Orthodox convert from Judaism named Matvei Berdichevsky, is among the few who are completely aware of Pelagia's abilities. As is the Imperial Governor of Zavolzhsk, a German emigre named Baron Anton von Haggenau.In Pelagia and the Red Rooster (US title: Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel) (Пелагия и красный петух), the action takes the reader from a steamboat on the Volga to Stroganovka, a fictitious village near the Urals, and on to Jerusalem, an early Zionist commune in Megiddo and to Sodom. Events in Imperial Russia move to Zhytomyr and Saint Petersburg. The context is the flourishing millennialism and sectarianism in 19th century Imperial Russia.