Thirst

The novel perfectly immerses in the atmosphere of the 19th century, in the world of mysticism and terrible myths, which makes them similar to the works of Nikolai Gogol, and the ability of the author, a professional historian, to notice and describe small details puts the book on the same shelf with the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
That summer in St. Petersburg there was incredible heat. People were hiding from the heat in their homes, but it helped little. The drought destroyed the crops, and the city slowly plunged into the chaos of hunger and epidemics.
At this time, the news of the murders in the maple grove came. Local shepherds found a muttered body of a woman. Immediately after this, two more corpses surfaced, and one more ... The capital detective of Peter Dmitrievich Insarov is sent to a maple grove to investigate mysterious murders.
Having examined the victims, the detective noticed that the dead were bloodless, as if blood was neatly merged or sucked through terrible wounds. But the other made Insarov cool with horror: one of the dead - a young red -haired woman - was like two drops of water similar to the Polish Princess Marina Vyshinskaya, depicted in an old picture in one of their local taverns. According to legend, Marina was poisoned by her own mother almost two hundred years ago