Samson Kolechko has been assigned a most perplexing case – though it is mostly perplexing because it’s hard to understand why selling the meat of one’s own pig constitutes a crime. But apparently it does, and at the insistence of the Chekist secret police officer assigned to “reinforce” the Lybid police station, Samson does his diligent – if diffident – best. Yet no sooner has he got started than his live-in fiancŽe Nadezhda is abducted by striking railway workers who object to the census she’s carrying out. And when you factor in a mysterious thief in the police station itself, a deadly tram accident that may have been pre-meditated, and the potential reappearance of the culprit in the case of the silver bone, it’s no wonder the “meat case” takes a back seat. But it is in the pursuit of that petty-fogging, seemingly mundane matter that Samson’s fate lies – and Nadezhda’s too, for the two are inextricably entwined. Translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk