Engineer of Death

6 hrs. 23 min.

Language Russian

Author Valery Sharapov

Narrator Yegor Fedotov

Description

A postwar detective story about betrayal, weapons, and a secret hidden in an old book.

A sweltering summer of 1950. A children’s library on Kirov Street. In the reading room, they find an elderly front-line veteran dead. His belongings are all in place—nothing has been stolen. Only one thing is missing:
GOETHE’S BOOK IN A FINE BINDING.

Investigator Arkady Nikitin immediately understands: this is not a theft. Who needed—and why—a poetic volume in German? To throw it into a potbellied stove? To sell it to middlemen? Or was there something between the pages that
NO ONE WAS SUPPOSED TO SEE?

Meanwhile, the local officer Sidorenkov notices in a trash bin an oil-soaked bundle. Inside are seven PPSh submachine guns and an old Polish rifle. Nikitin doesn’t yet know that within a day Sidorenkov will be stabbed on the stair landing—quickly, furiously—and that on the wall, in chalk, they will leave:
HE TOOK SOMETHING THAT WASN’T HIS.

Who is running this game? A mysterious “Engineer” selling weapons? A locksmith from Mosgaza? Or someone from a neighboring department who learned about Sidorenkov’s discovery before
THE CORPSE COOLED.

Colonel Pinchuk demands that Nikitin close the case as soon as possible and not dig any deeper. But Nikitin can’t stop. He digs—and reaches what they had wanted to hide forever. Because the party continues. Someone among the “own” has a double role—policeman and dealer in death. And now the main question is no longer “Who is the killer?” but…
CAN YOU SURVIVE WHEN A TRAITOR KNOWS ALL YOUR MOVES?