Plump up the cushions, switch off the phone, crack open a bottle of something dark and red – the new Boris Akunin paperback, Pelagia And The Black Monk, has arrived.

Akunin specialises in superbly well written and intricately plotted mysteries set in 19th Century Imperial Russia that draw liberal inspiration from the greats of Russian literature. His exceedingly popular Erast Fandorin series is set in the heart of the Westward facing Imperial court and centres on the adventures of an itinerant hero, who is Holmes, Bond and Oscar Wilde rolled into one. Sister Pelagia on the other hand, is a nun and girls’ school gym teacher in the fictional provincial town of Zavolzhsk.

As a nun Pelagia is clumsy and shy but she also has a talent for deduction and detection that her patron, Bishop Mifanii, has frequent cause to rely on. In Pelagia And The Black Monk, she investigates murder and madness in a remote spa town run by a secretive order of Monks. Whereas the Fandorin books are urban and urbane, the Sister Pelagia series is resolutely provincial, taking place in a Russia that is quite unlike anywhere West of the Don. Within this alien geographical canvas, Akunin allows himself room to breathe, to digress, to play with the form, utilising the stylistic devices of Dickens, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and the inspiration that dare not speak its name, Tolstoy. Yet his books are primarily great fun entertainments.

The first entry into the series, Pelagia And The White Bulldog, saw a thorough setting of the provincial scene with Akunin describing the social, political, judicial and religious structures and how they relate to each other as well as to the capital of Empire. What emerges is a complex web of superstition, customs and prejudices hundreds of years old as well as rapidly shifting alliances. All are depicted in great detail with more than half an eye on parallels with contemporary Russia  – although these are never obtrusive and never get in the in the way of the story.

Pelagia herself is a thoroughly appealing character. As a nun she is mousy and shy, but as her detective alter ego she is confident, resourceful, curious and worldly. She accepts her role to make Bishop Mifanii look good and treats her expeditions into the outside world as life-affirming excursions. Pelagia relishes dressing up in civvies pretending to be a beautiful cousin from Moscow. Like Mifanii, she has vanity and an ego yet remains a likeable and human presence.

Pelagia and the Black Monk is perhaps less descriptive than White Bulldog, but is instead far more playful. Akunin delights in jumping around in order to keep his plates spinning with a wry smile seemingly never far away. Lesser novelists would take these thousand strands and turn them into an ugly mess, but Akunin could not write a bad or inelegant sentence if he tried. This is detective fiction as if written by Conrad – Boris Akunin is that good.

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