The Secret of the Dutch Tiles

A strange theft occurs in an estate in Tsarskoe Selo near St. Petersburg—an unknown person takes only 20 ceramic tiles, Flemish work, united by a single theme: playing children. The owner of the house—a wealthy businessman—is seriously intrigued and asks the operative Maria Karavay from Petrovka—who has brilliantly proven herself in matters related to history and art—to handle the matter “privately.” At the same time in Moscow, fires nearly break out around the same moment: one at the luxurious “Metropol” hotel, the other in an office on Patriarch’s Ponds. In the fire, two people die who have nothing to do with each other— a Dutch tourist and a city antique dealer. And while the senior officer Andrey Yakovlev follows a trail that leads into a Ural prison where, for many years, a arsonist and mass murderer has been serving his sentence, Maria Karavay goes to Bruges and Antwerp to investigate the circumstances of the life of a mysterious family that lived in the 16th century. None of them, however, thinks that the four-century-old secret and the deaths in the fire of today might be links in the same chain…