Early 20th-century Petersburg is shaken by a string of loud murders. All the victims are men. And they were quite good-looking, with success among the fairer sex. Their deaths are diverse: someone dies poisoned by an expensive cigar, someone turns on a booby-trapped lamp, and for someone a rare handmade violin explodes right in their hands. Rodion Vanzarov has to put all the fragments of this bloody mosaic together. A thread leads to a desperate romance of the Russian emperor—and it seems that the Empire is facing a serious danger.