"The most successful retro-detective since Akunin" – Literratura
"Yulia Yakovleva’s thrilling debut was a bestseller in her native Russia. It’s not difficult to see why" – The Times, Best New Crime Fiction
On the eve of Stalin’s deadly great purge, a rider and his horse mysteriously collapse in the middle of a race in Leningrad.
Weary detective Zaitsev, still reeling from his last brush with the Party, is dispatched to the soviet state cavalry school near Ukraine to investigate.
There he witnesses the horror of the man-made Holodomor Famine as he struggles to penetrate the murky, secretive world of the school.
Why has this murder attracted so much attention from Soviet officials? Zaitsev needs to answer this question and solve the case before the increasingly paranoid authorities turn their attention to him…
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