In 1863, in Rome, on the villa of Hecate, a terrible crime took place: before a terrified mother’s eyes, a furry forest monster tore her son apart… Thirty years later, the artist Julius von Kleve created a cycle of paintings “Landscape with a Monster,” inspired by that tragedy. These canvases exerted an almost hypnotic effect on people, awakening in their souls a dark, secret evil…
In our days, the crime reporter of the Press Office of the Moscow Region Police Department, Ekaterina Petrovskaia, must unravel a tangle of even more terrible and mysterious crimes that happened in the family of a show-business star, Felix Sanin. Katya tries to understand whether there is a connection between Julius von Kleve’s paintings and modern murders that have shaken the fashionable village of Top’ in the Moscow region, where Russia’s bohemia lives…