St. Petersburg, icy winter of 1867. Two corpses were found in Petrovsky Park: in a suitcase the body of a dwarf with a cut head, and on the branch of a nearby tree - a man with a bloody ax in his belt. It would seem that the connection between murder and suicide is obvious... However, when investigator Porfiry Petrovich—our old acquaintance from F. M. Dostoevsky’s most “promoted” novel “Crime and Punishment”—takes up the case, everything turns out to be not so simple. The case will be solved, but for this, the Russian Poirot will have to go down to the very bottom of society, and gradually he will rise from the environment of brothels, taverns and pawnshops into noble spheres, where refined, and therefore especially disgusting, vice reigns. A brilliant stylization of the criminal-sentimental literature of the 19th century in A. Shabrin's excellent translation will be an exquisite gift for the most sophisticated connoisseur of the classic detective story.