A novel about life in a small Siberian town at the end of the 19th century, about love and betrayal, about human resilience in spite of circumstances. The police, the gendarmerie department and the Cossacks plan and carry out a joint, not devoid of grace, operation in the taiga to simultaneously destroy the Dubravin gang and suppress the activities of the organization of political exiles and the identification of propaganda workers in the gold mines. To ensure this operation, the police use embedded agents provocateurs. The small town of Yegoryevsk is full of past and present secrets, mutual loves and hates. At the intersection of all these passions, engineer Izmailov, a former People's Volunteer revolutionary, who came from St. Petersburg to the mines, finds himself. As a result of the development of storylines, Izmailov finds himself on the verge of death, but finds the strength not only to survive, but also to prevent bloody events at the gold mine. The diary of engineer Izmailov whimsically ends up in St. Petersburg, where it turns into a new novel by the St. Petersburg writer and almost folklore character for Yegoryevskaya’s life - Sophie Domogatskaya.