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Pelagia and the Black Monk takes the gentle template of the first Sister Pelagia novel and puts it on top of a much weirder foundation. A monastery on an island in the Volga is plagued by what appears to be the ghost of a dead saint, and Bishop Mitrofanii sends Sister Pelagia and another investigator in to figure out what is really happening.
What is really happening involves several Dostoyevsky novels at once. There is a holy fool. There is a brilliant atheist scientist. There is a community of Old Believers. Akunin is deliberately stacking late-19th-century Russian preoccupations on top of a country-house ghost mystery, and the reading experience is rich and a little unsettling and quietly funny.
Pelagia herself remains one of Akunin's warmest creations, sharp without being sour. The Bishop is even better here than in book one. Four stars. Read after Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog and try to read it slowly. There is a lot in this short novel.
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