A troop of Red Army soldiers has disappeared without a trace while visiting the Halytska bathhouse, their abandoned boots and uniforms the only proof that they ever existed.

Faced with such a fantastical conundrum, Samson must resort to a fantastical investigation method, but he discovers far more than he bargained for, and matters are further complicated by the human remains found in the stoves and the presence of a sinister religious cult in the city.

In the third of his Kyiv Mysteries, Andrey Kurkov, vividly depicts a city filled with political turbulence and eccentric characters - and draws ominous parallels with the present day.

Andrey Kurkov was a journalist, prison warder, cameraman and screenplay-writer before he became well known as a novelist. He received "hundreds of rejections" and was a pioneer of self-publishing, selling more than 75,000 copies of his books in a single year. His novel _Death and the Penguin_ became an international bestseller, translated into more than thirty languages. As well as writing fiction for adults and children, he has become known as a commentator and journalist on Ukraine for the international media. His work of reportage, _Ukraine Diaries: Dispatches from Kiev_ was followed by the novels _The Bickford Fuse_, _Grey Bees_, and_ Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv_ (longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023), as well as his non-fiction work _Diary of an Invasion_ (2022).