Alexander Nikolaevich Tsekhanovich (1862–1897) is a talented Russian fiction writer, one of many day laborers whose premature death cut short his creative and life path at the time of its heyday. He left an unusually diverse literary legacy: everyday and moral stories, criminal and adventure novels... Tsekhanovich collaborated with many editors of newspapers and magazines in St. Petersburg, but, publishing mainly in periodicals, the writer did not wait for his works to appear as books. Only posthumously, through the efforts of publishers, his prose was collected and published. Two works of the writer are published in this volume. The novel “A Terrible Business” tells the story of a grandiose scam and the irresistible power of its organizer, a handsome hypnotist, over people. In the novel “The Secret of the Gloomy House,” villainy and virtue, the puzzling tricks of swindlers and the triumph of Russian detective analysts come together.