Young actress Alexandra Lanskaya decides to take revenge on her husband for cheating on him with a young beauty. A plan has been drawn up that seems easy to implement. But as soon as she begins to act, the actress finds herself in the world of crime, a deadly situation from which it is not easy to extricate herself. Life is not a movie, where heroes smeared with ketchup easily deal with vile scoundrels. Life is unpredictable: how could Alexandra have foreseen that she would end up looking like a famous businesswoman and that the fatal resemblance would make her rush around like a hare fleeing from hounds? Only instead of dogs, Alexandra is pursued by thugs who have been ordered to destroy a businesswoman - Lanskaya’s double. Forced to resist violence and cynicism, the heroine discovers in those around her “unprofitable,” “outdated” feelings of friendship, self-sacrifice, and spiritual nobility. The novel has plenty of plot twists and criminal collisions , but something prevents us from quickly labeling it as a “sentimental or ironic detective story” or “women’s novel.” The author balances at the intersection of genres, like a hang glider soaring in air currents, unexpectedly changing direction and altitude. Cicada in Japanese - “ utsusemi,” the same word denotes earthly life. Maybe here is the key to the theme of the novel? “In autumn, the voices of cicadas fill the entire ear... And it seems that they are not crying about this fragile and empty world, like a cicada shell?” - a free translation by the Japanese classic of a quote from a poem by Bo Ju-i. Anyone familiar with Chinese and Japanese philosophical lyrics immediately understands: the author of “Cicadas” outlined the novel’s coordinate system. At one pole is an arrogant Eternity, before which both life and death are equally insignificant, indifferent to the metamorphoses of the world. On the other is the miracle of the human soul, its greatness, the endless journey of this luminous grain of sand in the universe. And moments come when Eternity bows its head before a grain of sand...