December 1934. Moscow is in ferment after the assassination of one of Stalin's closest aides, leading to a wave of new arrests and summary executions. Investigator Anton Belkin already thinks he is close to breaking point, when his close friend, the chef Misha Kazakov, is arrested on a trumped-up charge of attempted assassination by poisoning of a senior Moscow official. For Anton the question isn't whether Misha is guilty, but why the secret police want him out of the way.And with Anton's father, a dissenting artist, attracting attention in all the wrong ways, whether Anton can save Misha without becoming ensnared in the ever-more tangled web of conspiracy around him.