Chief Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko's investigation of three mutilated bodies reaches to the highest levels of the Communist hierarchy.

Arkady Renko returns for his most enigmatic and baffling case: the death of one of Russia's new billionaires, which leads him to the Zone of Exclusion -- Chernobyl, and the surrounding areas closed to the world since the nuclear disaster of 1986.

The fearless reporter Tatiana Petrovna falls to her death from a sixth-floor window in Moscow the same week that a mob billionaire, Grisha Grigo-renko, is shot and buried with the trappings due a lord. No one else makes the connection, but Arkady is transfixed by the tapes he discovers of Tatiana’s voice describing horrific crimes in words that are at odds with the Kremlin’s official versions. The trail leads to Kaliningrad, a Cold War “secret...

Investigator Arkady Renko, the pariah of the Moscow prosecutor's office, has been assigned the thankless job of investigating a new phenomenon: late-night subway riders report seeing the ghost of Joseph Stalin on the platform of the Chistye Prudy Metro station. The illusion seems part political hocus-pocus and also part wishful thinking, for among many Russians Stalin is again popular; the bloody dictator can boast a two-to-one approval rating. Decidedly...