Even if dawn comes, darkness will come again to take its place…
November 1982. The anniversary of the wedding of the Smelyanskys is overshadowed by the death of Leonid Brezhnev. The new General Secretary is a huge stress for people who have something to lose. And the Smelyanskys and their guests are precisely the kind of people who are the real nomenklatura elite. But that’s not the worst thing. That evening, their thirteen-year-old son Seryozha and their friend Alena’s daughter left for the cinema and never returned…
After a call “from the very top,” the search for the missing children brings in Major of the Militia Viktor Gordeev. His promotion to deputy head of the “murder” department depends on how quickly—and most importantly, successfully—he gets results. But what guarantees can there be? And what if they are already dead? Besides, in the country there is a maniac killing teenagers aged 13–16. And Gordeev’s friend, an employee of the criminal investigation department, Leonid Cheryomin, suspects the worst.
However, his foster daughter—Nastya Kamenskaya, a recent graduate of the law faculty of Moscow State University—has a different opinion: the missing children don’t fit the pattern of a serial killer. The operatives begin working through all possible versions. And then employees of the KGB get involved in the investigation…
The first retro-detective novel by Alexandra Marinina. An astonishingly accurate atmosphere of late Soviet times, the moods of people, their fears and hopes. Criminal investigators, militia officers, and KGB—ordinary citizens and those who were admitted to the “socialist feeder”—each of them has their own story and their own motives.