Sergeant Kukushkin’s ordinary life suddenly starts taking strange turns. A duty call arrives—predicting an incident. Then the school friend and first love—Mira—appears on the doorstep of Pavel’s home, asking for help to secretly escape her husband. Who would have thought that six days later Mira would be gone? And the time and place of her death will be named by an unknown woman who called into the duty desk a few days before the tragedy. Young sergeant Pavel needs to find the woman who called, to make sense of the secrets Mira carried with her when she jumped from a bridge. What made her take her own life and her child’s? Did she have a choice? Pavel needs answers to these questions—both as a policeman and as a man in love.
“I can’t leave”—the most common line uttered by victims of cruel treatment or violence. Maria Tovich’s debut book is a novel of hope for a better future for women whose situation seems hopeless. It’s a story where pressing issues are woven skillfully and playfully into a detective plot. A book where you have to make fateful decisions, lie for the sake of a new life. Is there room for condemnation here? Read it and answer: could you leave?