Victorian England, Portsmouth. A new guest arrives at Clarendon House, “a boarding house for gentlemen with frayed nerves” – Charles Dodgson, already famous as Lewis Carroll, author of “Alice in Wonderland” – and his nerves are very frayed. Charles Dodgson has ominous dreams - his own characters prophesy blood, death and disasters of an unknown nature to him and his friends, and these predictions come true again and again. Who should you turn to with such a riddle if not Mr. X, who understands the background of all human actions? This blind and insane anchorite, the singer of rationality, the prototype of Sherlock Holmes, reveals terrible secrets without leaving the room, using the mere power of deduction - but how will his new battle with the “Union of Ten” end? Jose Carlos Somoza is a brilliant Spanish writer, whose novels have been translated in several dozen languages, winner of the Golden Dagger Award and winner of many other literary awards, creator of multi-layered worlds where very terrible things are happening, author of fantastic, philosophical, historical thrillers and horror. In The Sign of Ten, the sequel to A Study in Black, the infernally insightful Mr. X and his faithful, ironic, strong and sensitive nurse Anne McCurry return, and with them actors, prop men and spectators of cruel underground theaters are involved in an unpredictable intrigue , famous psychiatrists and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle. For the first time in Russian!