Novels about real heroes of their era—employees of the Soviet militia, people for whom a service feat is just everyday work. The early seventies. In Moscow, on the roadside of the Zvenigorod highway, the body of a young man is found. The operations group of Captain Roman Savin manages to establish that the victim—professional photographer Ilya Manyukhov—was involved in dubious business: blackmailing wealthy men with compromising photos. Among the photographs taken by Manyukhov, Savin finds an image of a girl whose body was found buried on a city beach a year ago. Could it be that the cunning blackmailer is somehow connected to her death?… The captain doesn’t yet know that he is holding a thread leading to truly terrifying events—things that happened quite recently. When honor and selfless devotion to a dangerous profession were the main and mandatory qualities of Soviet militiamen…