Shadow of Heat" (1994) is not just good prose. This is a piece of time, most carefully drawn in the Genre. The author himself designates the genre in the text twice: the first part is Hammett’s “The Big Raid,” the second is a comic book, a democratic toy of the West. Structure, plot, characters - everything exists according to literary laws, those that shape reality. It’s not for nothing that the main character of the first part, who unravels a non-standard crime, is a philologist by training. He invents a criminal, portrays him using the laws of prose - and in the end he is faced with a fictional character who has taken on flesh. In addition to literary allusions, the text is presented as a space of children's play; the first part is “Cough” with the subtitle “Playing Twelve Sticks.” The second part is “Korsakov Syndrome” (“Playing Hide and Seek”). The expression “our good old sky,” borrowed from Vertinsky, from the other world of the last century, runs like a blue thread through the entire novel, stitches its pages, intertwines with reality, adding the necessary amount of melancholy to it.