Sixty Deaths per Minute

He is a man of stone, a man of flint. His coworkers from the MUR’s “killings” department worship him, and his enemies fear him terribly. Criminals have long stopped trying to bribe him—he won’t take a bribe anyway, and besides, he’ll grind them to dust for it… No, he is by no means an angel, not some perfect policeman. Often, while dealing with lawbreakers, he himself uses harsh measures that are not entirely lawful. Yet he isn’t looking for personal gain. In the swamp of corruption and lies, he sets one single goal: at any cost, dig out the truth. Remember this name. His name is Major Yuri Devyatkin.

Moscow police discover in the car of an American businesswoman, Jane Maisy, the corpse of an unknown man. And then Jane herself, after flying to Tajikistan on business, disappears there without a trace. In Moscow, the murder case of the man falls to Major Devyatkin, while an attorney, Radchenko, urgently flies to find Maisy in Dushanbe. These people do not yet know each other, and they still don’t know that they are working on the very same case—and that they are moving toward one point where life and death merge into one…