Anastasia Kamenskaya and her former colleague Yuri Korotkov arrived in the remote Siberian city of Verbitsk. Nastya's brother is going to build an expensive boarding house here and asked them to find a suitable place. However, the Verbitsk authorities are not interested in Moscow investors. In the midst of the election campaign, a wave of mysterious murders of environmentalists swept through the city. People blame the officials for everything. The mayor and his friends are too zealously defending the animal farm, hidden in the remote taiga forest. But they say that it is the farm that harms the local ecology. Of course, this case fascinated Kamenskaya much more than the search for some kind of plot....-------------------------------------------Marinina not only writes detective novels, but also answers eternal questions. The author treats his readers like a kind and experienced teacher to students who need support, guidance and guidance on the right path. Optimistic and practical in her didactics, Marinina poses the question “how to live" and tries to help the reader find his way to a better life in today's world. Marinina writes a modern novel "education of feelings" with her detective stories: the author's main goal is education through entertainment." — Anatoly Vishevsky, Grenell College, USA"Many of Alexandra Marinina's novels have been adapted into films in Russia and reworked into radio plays in Germany. Based on the fact that the purpose of these treatments is to capture viewers and listeners in the same way that readers are captured, the film and the radio play are not only additional works of fiction, but also interesting interpretations that have penetrated into the secret of Alexandra Marinina's success." — Sarah Hagi, University of Cologne, Germany"In the dialogues of fiction and trivial literature, one can find different ways of stylizing "verbality" in order to achieve the impression of spontaneous conversation. Everyday speech in A. Marinina's novels is characterized by an unusually high degree of animation, which is expressed, among other things, in the different forms of address of the interlocutors, in various shades of politeness and in the emotionality of the vocabulary used." — Wolfgang Stadler, Leopold Franzen University, Innsbruck, Austria.