Death in a Cherry-Red Niner

The famous detective duo Leonov—Meyeyev. Colonel Lev Gurov of the Ministry of Internal Affairs is invited to the festive anniversary of a powerful film producer, Mikhail Makovsky—a man with a loud past tied to a criminal authority. In the middle of the evening, the host makes Gurov a personal request: find and bring home his twenty-year-old daughter, who got involved with dubious people and disappeared without a trace. But already the next morning, Makovsky is found hanged in the garage. His wife insists that his suicide was driven by the daughter’s irresponsibility, yet Gurov doesn’t believe in this simple version.

Suspicion turns into certainty when experts discover that first the man was shot, and then the killer staged a suicide by suspending the body in a noose. Gurov takes the investigation and begins to dig into the dark pages of Makovsky’s gang past—and soon a story surfaces that someone very much wanted to hide forever…

Nikolay Leonov, a former detective from the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department, knew from the inside how to unravel the most difficult crimes. That’s why his novels are marked by credibility, momentum, and unexpected endings. At the center of the series is Colonel Lev Gurov: a first-class operative, a man of strong character and principles. He is respected by colleagues, feared by opponents, and women are never indifferent to him—he is rightfully considered one of the brightest heroes of Russian detective fiction. Stories about Gurov have held readers’ attention for several decades, and the classic series “Black Cat” includes more than two hundred books released in huge multi-million print runs.