The Retribution of Baikal

A region of almost mystical, mesmerizing beauty, where the grandeur and silence of nature sharply contrast with the cruelty and tragedy of an ideally perfect murder.

On the frozen shore of Lake Baikal, they discover the body of the former American diplomat Edwin Ashford. He was killed with a single precise, clearly professional stab from a knife. Money and personal belongings are left in place. There are no clues.

This mysterious crime threatens to turn into an international scandal: the investigation inevitably brings in the Russian and American special services, whose interests inevitably collide. Independent expert Drongo—a brilliant analyst with a phenomenal memory—gets pulled into the case, along with practical FBI agent Joan Crossman, who arrives from Washington to keep the investigation under control.

Gradually it becomes clear that everyone who was connected to Ashford has something to hide. The secret love turns out to be the prosecutor’s wife; the ex-wife is a CIA officer… As investigators unravel the tangled web of affairs, broken courts, and the shadows of the “Cold War,” they try to understand what this murder was—a political signal or a belated, terrible reckoning for a tragedy born thirty years earlier in ruthless intelligence-versus-intelligence confrontation…

There are wounds that do not heal—they turn into a sentence.