The novel describes the events that took place in the troubled 90s at the turn of the two millennia in Tatarstan, where there was a struggle between law enforcement agencies and criminal gangs. The main character is prosecutor's office investigator Marat Bilyalov, a man of difficult fate - investigating a complex criminal case of violent death young men from among the “golden youth”. His corpse with a gunshot wound was found on the banks of the Kazanka River, on Fedorovsky Hill. At the same ill-fated place, earlier in the 19th century, Alexey Peshkov (the future great Russian writer Maxim Gorky) shot himself, trying to commit suicide. This work touches on other rare historical events and facts from the times of Ivan the Terrible and Catherine the Great, as well as events of the early 20th century that concerned the Kazan land: the disappearance and search for the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God. The novel is written on a documentary basis.