If given the chance, Arthur Conan Doyle the recognized master of the detective genre would not have missed a single plot from the stories described in this book. And Sherlock Holmes’s famous card index would be filled with a dozen more captivating tales. Because in the golden period for Russian criminal justice—the 18th and 19th centuries—something worse than mere horrors was happening in Russia: truly virtuoso frauds. Thieves and bandits no longer relied on brute force; they used cleverness. Informers, pickpockets, and pimps honed the art of seduction and swindling of the unsuspecting ordinary person, and the ends of every crime were so expertly tangled that catching the criminals and their accomplices was virtually impossible. Day and night, the best police officers and detectives in the country puzzled over murders, robberies, and scams elevated to the rank of an art—until they finally put an end to this criminal-lawlessness.