The 50th, anniversary novel by Alexandra Marinina.
For the first time, Anastasia Kamenskaya studies an old criminal case involving a real crime. The convicted person is still serving his sentence in a correctional facility.
Since childhood, we’ve been accustomed to believing that truth is one. It’s like a white pebble in a heap of black gravel. Just sort through everything, and you will surely find it—the only, indisputable, unconditional truth… But is it really like that?
Long ago, in a Moscow communal apartment, a cruel triple murder was committed: the parents and a child were killed. The suspect came forward himself with a confession. He was detained, there was an investigation and a trial.
After twenty years, the old case file ends up in the hands of the legendary retired operative Anastasia Kamenskaya and a young journalist, Pyotr Kravchenko. The young man believes the convicted person was framed and tries to bring the investigators to clean water. And that’s when it turns out: everyone in this story is driven by their own truth—which, in turn, breeds thousands of kinds of lies…