A century-old mystery takes Rostnikov halfway around the world.

In the waning days of the Russian Empire, the Czar inked a secret treaty with Japan that was stolen en route by one of the workmen on the Trans-Siberian Railway. More than a one hundred years later, the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Czardom, and police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov is trying to find his way in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. A large amount of money is being sent from Odessa to Vladivostok to purchase a mysterious Czarist document, and Rostnikov's superior believes it may be this long-lost treaty. Eastbound ticket in hand, Rostnikov sets out to investigate.

Meanwhile, his subordinates in Moscow tackle a female Jack the Ripper and an anti-Semitic punk rocker whose mob connections may have gotten him kidnapped. It's a brave new world in western Russia, but where Rostnikov is going, the landscape hasn't changed in centuries.

Rostnikov confronts a mystery that stretches from Moscow to the stars.

Once, Russian children wanted to be cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin. But the Soviet Union is dead, and the days of Gagarin's glory are long passed. For the men and women aboard the decaying Mir space station, life is an unending series of near-disasters. During one such breakdown, cosmonaut Tsimion Vladovka asks ground control to contact Moscow police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov if anything happens to him. And when Vladovka disappears a year after his safe return to Earth, Rostnikov is the only man who can find him.

A philosophical detective, Rostnikov has made a name for himself navigating the bureaucracies of the Kremlin. But never has he encountered anything like the labyrinth that is Star City, home of the Russian space program. Something has terrified the cosmonaut, and since he knows dangerous state secrets, he must be found, alive or dead. But if a man who braved outer space is scared, what chance does an earthbound detective have?

On the eve of a show trial, a Soviet dissident is stabbed through the heart.

On a frigid night in silent Moscow, Aleksander Granovsky paces the floor of his government flat. He has dedicated his life to exposing the brutality of the Russian penal system, and in two days he will be tried for the crime of smuggling essays to the West. Granovsky is drafting a speech to deliver in court when an assassin appears and pierces his heart with the point of a rusty sickle.

The case falls in the lap of Porfiry Rostnikov, a Moscow police inspector whose three decades on the force have made him an expert in navigating the labyrinths of the Soviet bureaucracy. But it will take every ounce of Rostnikov's skill to find the killer and survive the investigation, as every question he asks takes him closer to the heart of the KGB.

A woman fights to protect her family when, eight years after her husband's murder, his killers return.

Bittie's hot dogs are worth waiting for. Outside the hot dog stand one summer afternoon, Maureen sits with her two children in the family's car, wishing her husband would hurry up and get their food. Two men lurk nearby -- a couple of drunks who had followed them from the supermarket. Before David can get into the car, the drunk men confront him, attack him, and take a baseball bat to his skull, while Maureen desperately tries to shield their little boy and girl.

Eight years later, Maureen doesn't eat hot dogs anymore. She makes a living as an exercise instructor and all-around fitness freak, a rigorously disciplined lifestyle that has just managed to see her family through the horror of David's murder. But one day, the phone rings -- a message from the killers that they are not finished tormenting her family. They are coming for Maureen, and no matter how fit she is, she cannot run fast enough to escape.

A simple job turns treacherous when Toby Peters stumbles upon a corpse.

It's a lucky thing that Cary Grant once trained as an acrobat, because Toby Peters's life is in the actor's hands. As the two men sprint through the pitch-dark woods, trying to elude the man with the gun, they come to a canyon ledge. With nowhere to go but down, they scramble over the side. Peters slips, and Grant grabs hold of his wrist. As the killer closes in, Cary's grip begins to falter.

The job began simply. Grant hired the Hollywood detective as a bagman in a blackmailing hand-off. He gives Toby a satchel full of cash, to be exchanged for an envelope of the leading man's secrets -- not sexual or financial, but details of his work for the British crown. When the envelope bearer winds up dead, Toby and Cary dive into a complex plot of murder, money, and Nazi spies, which ends with them trapped in an all-too-literal cliffhanger.