People Behind You. Volume 1

This is not an ordinary detective story, but a carefully crafted, tense tale about people who hide their true intentions, try on different roles, and make choices for which everyone has to pay. Here is what readers value in Marinina: Anastasia Kamenskaya, an intricate investigation, precise psychology, and the sense that the most important thing always slips away and remains in the shadows. A book for those who care not only about intrigue and the resolution, but also about the meaning that stays with you afterward.

At the private detective agency “Vlastа,” where Anastasia Kamenskaya works, Oleg Shebalin arrives—a former theater critic who has now become a “companion for ladies.” He asks for something strange: to find a woman he would occasionally go to the theater with. Now she has disappeared. The problem is that he knows almost nothing about her—neither her surname, nor her address, nor her phone number…

At first, it seems like an absurd and almost impossible assignment. And why would a theater “gigolo” be so determined to find his missing client? By drawing on old connections, Kamenskaya discovers: the mysterious theatergoer is not who she claimed to be. She has a stolen biography and fake documents, and her past reaches back to a long-ago story that once cost the lives of several people. But that’s not where the chain ends—then, one after another, new deaths come to light…