In a quiet provincial town on the Volga, people begin disappearing in large numbers. When police employees sent to search for them arrived, they found charred human remains in a local reserve. Forensic experts established that the remains belonged to at least ten victims—and later arrived at an even more shocking conclusion: all the victims were burned alive. The best Moscow detectives, Lev Gurov and Stas Kryachko, are urgently flown to the crime scene. They begin the investigation, but very soon run into some inexplicable, fanatical resistance from the townspeople. The detectives are constantly tried on to be killed—by completely different people, often far removed from the world of crime…