Grigory Ryazhsky considers his new book, “The Museum Novel,” already the fifteenth, as a personal experiment, as the experience of writing a novel in an unusual literary-crime genre, defined by the author himself as a “cultural detective story.” There is a mystery, there is a crime, a detective, or rather a detective, there is an investigation, there is punishment. But, of course, this is more than a detective story. The famous Moscow art critic, specialist in the Russian avant-garde, Lev Arsenyevich Alabin, receives a flattering offer to join the commission for the exchange of the famous collection of drawings by masters of European painting, exported in 1945 from defeated Germany, for a collection of works by Russian avant-garde artists, stolen by the Germans during the war from provincial museums of the USSR. In this regard, a large exhibition is being prepared at the Museum of Painting and Art, where the drawings have been kept until now, but suddenly the museum caretaker discovers that some of the drawings are fakes. That's when the detective story begins. However, the criminal in him is doomed in advance, because the caretaker who discovered the fake has an amazing gift - she is able to foresee the future and communicates with the ghosts of the dead...