Following his investigations in The Holy Thief, Captain Alexei Korolev is uneasy– his new-found knowledge is dangerous, and if some of his actions during the case come to light, he will face deportation to the frozen camps of the far north. But when the knock on the door comes, in the dead of night, it is not Siberia Korolev is destined for. Instead, the detective is asked to look into the suspected suicide of a young woman, Maria Lenskaya, and when the detective arrives on the set for Bloody Meadow, in the bleak, famine-scarred Ukraine, he soon discovers that there is more to Lenskaya’s death than meets the eye . . .  “In a topsy-turvy world where logic and experience can’t compete against a capricious tyranny, Korolev knows only too well that survival is a fluke and safety is an illusion. This is very neatly plotted and well written, and amounts to a convincing recreation of paranoia in Stalinist Russia.” - The Literary Review “… razor-sharp plotting, an evocative sense of location in a vividly realised Ukraine and most winning of all the vulnerably human Alexei Korolev making a nuisance of himself.” - The Daily Express