The Personal File of Sterkhova

7 hrs. 17 min.

Language Russian

Author Anna Knyazeva

Narrator Alexey Isievsky

For twenty-three years, Anna Sterkhova lived with the certainty that she knew how Valya Beletskiy—the boy she had loved at seventeen—died.

It all began with their last argument. Anna left the boathouse, while Valya stayed. A few days later, his body was found in the river. The investigation materials included a dry formulation: “After an argument with a girl, he was left alone.” And so a stranger’s version became official truth—and a sentence for Anna, one she had to live with.

Twenty-three years later, Valya’s mother meets her in the yard and slaps her.

“Have you learned to live with that? But you didn’t let my son.”

Now Anna is a deputy colonel, investigating old crimes. She opens an archived case and realizes that the past was recorded not the way it truly happened.

In the folder, the number of pages doesn’t match. The witnesses remember the same things differently. Valya’s final route leads upstream. On the old boat, there are traces that no one has managed to explain. And Anna’s former school friend accidentally speaks two words—after which the old version falls apart.

To understand what happened that night, Sterkhova will have to return to where she once left from—back to the boathouse, to old friends, to her first love, and to that seventeen-year-old girl she used to be.

Because sometimes the hardest thing is to admit that all these years you remembered it wrong.

1. Song of the Black Angel (narrated by Irina Vorobyova) 2. The Killer Returns Twice (narrated by Alexey Isievsky) 3. The Water Is Cold in September (narrated by Alexey Isievsky) 4. Clue No. 13 (narrated by Alexey Isievsky) 5. White Asphalt (narrated by Alexey Isievsky) 6. Don't Wait for Me Long (narrated by Alexey Isievsky) 7. The Forgotten Case of the Kalevala (narrated by Alexey Isievsky) 8. The Personal File of Sterkhova

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