For the first time in Russian - a continuation of “the best British debut in the detective genre for many years” (Crimescene Magazine), “a razor-sharp noir, something completely out of the ordinary” (Lee Child). Aidan Waits's first novel, Sirens, became England's top best-selling mystery debut of 2017 (100,000 copies in circulation), has been translated into 18 languages, and is currently published by Lookout Point (A Suitable Groom, " Gentleman Jack) is preparing a film adaptation of the entire trilogy. Detective Constable Aidan Waits and his partner on the night shift, Detective Inspector Sutcliffe, respond to a call at the closed Palace Hotel. On the fifth floor of an empty historical building, they find a man - dark, blue-eyed, smiling widely and dead. Decently dressed, but without a single document in his pockets, and not even a label on his clothes. Moreover, the skin was removed from the fingertips, and the teeth were ground into crowns. How to solve the murder of a person who seemed not to exist? Especially when an uninvited and terrifying ghost appears from Aidan Waits' past life... A word to the author: “The Smiling Man was inspired by a real murder that has remained unsolved for seventy years, and even the identity of the victim has not yet been established. Perhaps this is the strangest and most mysterious case in the history of world criminology.”