Every person has their own destiny, their own cross. Mine is, well… Viola Tarakanova—and I carry mine by constantly getting tangled up in criminal stories. It’s quite a burden, I must say, but if not for this trait of mine, where would the writer Arina Violova—under that pseudonym I write detective novels—find new plots? As it is, they find me. For example, I went into a boutique to pick out fashionable clothes and discovered under the sofa in the fitting room a girl named Vera. Interesting—does she really have the mind of a psychopath the way she seems, and is she really a murderer, as she says herself—or… Of course, “or”! Naturally, everything is staged! But who and why drives Vera mad—no, straight to the grave? We’ll have to figure it out, and in the process, a new detective story will write itself. So, let’s start again…