.”At the window, on a roughly hewn table, lay slices of bread pecked by a magpie and coarsely chopped pieces of sausage. A half-liter bottle stood nearby. A man lay on the dirty floor, holding a knife in his hand and staring at the ceiling with glassy eyes. There is a brown blood stain on the left side of the chest.” And it all started with a seemingly ordinary robbery... The new book by the recognized master of the Russian action-packed genre includes works in which Anton Biryukov, well known to the reader, and his colleagues are again on the trail of daring and cunning criminals.