In prison life, different things happen, including murders. The main character of the novel, Major Protasov, works in a correctional colony as a regime supervisor. He is an honest and decent officer, and when a person approaches him with a request to “turn a blind eye” to the death of prisoners, he accepts the customer’s rules of the game and begins his investigation. Criminals are resourceful, and finding the culprit of three contract killings is not easy for the major. The tangle is tangled, and unraveling it becomes a matter of honor for the officer. The zone lives by its own laws and rules, which no one has the right to violate. And only when the major approaches the customer, he understands what motives guided him and why the deadly game was started in which the prisoners died.