What a strange book. Pelagia and the Red Rooster, the third and final instalment of Boris Akunin’s thoroughly enjoyable Sister Pelagia series, takes the appealingly un-nunnish nun far outside her familiar world of sleuthery.

Based on two previous outings, it would be easy to see Sister Pelagia as a provincially Russian Miss Marple to Erast Fandorin’s urbane Poirot. Although this comparison undersells the complexity of Akunin’s work, it is nonetheless understandable. This third episode however, is something altogether different; something other-worldly, searching, millennial. It is a very unexpected and unsettling turn indeed.

Akunin’s books are set after the sudden ending of reform by a new autocratic Tsar. A great period of cultural and social liberalisation is over. This era that saw the emergence of Gogol, Chekov, Turgenev, and Tcahikovsky and great social progress is brushed away as the newly insular authorities try to turn back the clock. This Russia is once more a dark, arbitrarily autocratic, rigidly hierarchical place. But the genie will not go back into the bottle and the only remaining options appear to lie between an ever more paranoid and didactic authority, or nihilistic chaos. Any parallels between this 19th Century Russia and the modern day version are entirely deliberate.

Akunin is a learned, stylish, self-consciously middle-class and middle-brow writer. The closest comparison is perhaps to the Umberto Eco of The Name of the Rose – although Akunin wears his erudition more lightly. As with Eco, Akunin’s books display an author simultaneously unashamed to know stuff, but relaxed enough about it not to feel the need to display it  and not to be shy of entertainment for its own sake. Akunin is a stylist, but he is no showy, fancy dan.

Pelagia And The Red Rooster, starts as a routine investigation into the murder on a river ferry of one of many self-proclaimed millenial prophets. It quickly becomes clear the victim is a follower and not the prophet himself and that Sister Pelagia’s dogged pursuit of the murderer and the real prophet has put her in mortal danger. Pelagia flees to Palestine to continue her search across the Holy Land, unaware she is being pursued by an unidentified assassin. Back in Russia her friends and associates try to uncover why Pelagia has become a target through the labyrinthine corridors of Russian power.

What develops from the investigations in Russia and Palestine is an increasingly murky physical world. Pelagia’s search becomes a quest for meaning where there appears to be none. Her friends’ quest is to bring rational justice into the political world. As the book unfolds, Akunin, a rational, liberal, humanist,  stretches that definition to the absolute limit.

As ever the journey to the grand finale is richly entertaining, Pelagia is a wonderfully appealing character and Pelagia And The Red Rooster reveals itself to be less a strange book and more an extraordinary novel from a singular talent.

P.S. This is the final instalment of the Pelagia series and consequently I am in light mourning. Worse, I am also up to date on the Erast Fandorin series, with the recently published (and inevitably excellent) The Coronation. However there could be much more Akunin to read –  as long as the publishers have the rights and have commissioned the translations.

So with fingers crossed, I hope it is not long before we have translations of the next four already published, episodes of Erast Fandorin, which take the great man to 1910. Apparently the series ultimately finishes in 1916, so there should be a handful more  (as yet unwritten) episodes before then.  I would also love to see  English language versions of the three books covering the exploits of Erast Fandorin’s grandson, which are set in modern day London.

In addition Akunin has also written a series called The Genre Project, where each novel is based on (you guessed it ) a different literary genre. So far there has been Spy Book, Children’s Book and Science Fiction Book. Best sounding of all though, is his “cinematic novel”, ten novellas covering the duration of the First World War, which is thus far up to 1915.

All that lot will do for now please Mr Publisher – I can perhaps live without his 20 volume Anthology of Japanese Literature. Thanks in advance.

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