Shroud of the Scarlet Rose

It seems the new case of Stepan Koshkin can be solved without leaving the crime scene: the victim managed, with her own blood, to write the name of the murderer on the wall. The alleged villain has been caught, but he doesn’t admit guilt and, it seems, has no motive. Yet while the police intensively search for this motive, Koshkin gets his hands on the diaries of that very victim—Alla Soboleva. She’s a kind woman of forty-five, a widow of a respectable man who has lived quietly and alone for many years in an old estate among a pink garden.

The diaries tell about the times when Alla was called Rose, when she was young, and far from as harmless and pious as people have come to think of her… The more Koshkin immerses himself in reading, the more obvious it becomes to him that this investigation won’t be a simple case.