The Secret of the Dutch Tiles

A strange theft occurs in a mansion in Tsarskoye Selo near St. Petersburg: an unknown person takes only 20 Flemish tiles, unified by a single theme—children playing. The homeowner, a wealthy businessman, is seriously intrigued and asks investigator Maria Karavai from Petrovka, who has an excellent track record in matters connected to history and art, to handle this “privately.”

At the same time, almost simultaneously in Moscow, fires break out: one in the luxurious Metropol hotel, the other in an office on Patriarch’s Ponds. Two people die in the flames who have nothing to do with each other—a Dutch tourist and a city antique dealer. And while senior investigator Andrei Yakovlev follows a trail that leads to an Urals prison where the arsonist and mass murderer has been serving a sentence for many years, Maria Karavai goes to Bruges and Antwerp, investigating the circumstances of a mysterious family that lived in the 16th century. None of them, however, thinks that the secret of four centuries ago and present-day deaths by fire could be links in a single chain...