The Olga Pushkin Mysteries

Olga Pushkin, Railway Engineer (Third Class) and would-be best-selling author, spends her days in a little rail-side hut with only Dmitri the hedgehog for company. While tourists and travellers clatter by on the Trans-Siberian Express, Olga dreams of studying literature at Tomsk State University and escaping the sleepy, snow-clad village of Roslazny. But Roslazny doesn't stay sleepy for long. One day Olga arrives at her hut only to be knocked unconscious by a man falling from the Trans-Siberian, an American tourist with his throat cut from ear to ear.

Winter has come early to the tiny Siberian village of Roslazny, but for Olga Pushkin, aspiring writer and Railway Engineer (Second Class), it only makes leaving the harder. Olga is being forced overseas by her jealous superior, and now faces two years in exile from her beloved rail-side hut, her white-breasted hedgehog Dmitri and Vassily Marushkin, sergeant-in-charge at the tiny Roslazny police station. Fate seems to intervene when Olga's train crashes outside Roslazny, shutting the line and killing two on board—local celebrity Danyl Petrovich and his wife, Anoushka.

Literary fame beckons for Olga Pushkin, Railway Engineer (Second Class), when her self-help manual for hard-working women is published at last. But Olga's scheming superior, Boris Andreyev, forces her to babysit a special Romanov-themed murder mystery steam train doing the rounds of the local towns. Parked in a siding near Roslazny, the players deliver the first of several intended performances - only for a staged murder to become very real. Vassily starts a homicide investigation in conjunction with his boss but both are baffled when another murder follows on the heels of the first.