Ivan Putilin, chief of the St. Petersburg detective police, retires and settles in an estate on the bank of the Volkhov River. He decides to publish his memoirs and invites writer Safronov to record and process his accounts. The first case Putilin tells about is the murder of an Austrian military attaché, Prince von Arennsberg. The number of suspects grows, and an international scandal brews. The killer turns out to be the very person who hadn’t even suspected himself to be guilty of such a murder…
The plot of the murder of von Arennsberg, Leonid Yuzefovich took from the memoirs of the historical I. D. Putilin “Forty Years Among Robbers and Murderers,” published in 1893 by a publisher named Safonov, who in the novel becomes Safronov.
This historical detective story will interest both specialists in the history of the 19th century and, simply, lovers of this gripping genre.