The Arctic city Murmansk, capital of the Kola region of north Russia, early in the new century. Inspector Constantin Vadim is back in his home town after a brief and nearly catastrophic appointment is Moscow.
But now he is faced with a frightening personal challenge: one night his young wife, Natalya, a doctor, answers an emergency medical call - twelve hours later she still hasn't come back. An accident seems the first possibility. Or even a lover. Yet soon a more terrifying answer begins to emerge as Vadim's desperate investigation reveals that a second missing woman, an American consular official, was abducted on the same night.
Frustrated by the strange twists and contradictions in the case, Vadim surrenders to the dark power of Russian myth and prophecy. But he is linked in uneasy partnership with a black FBI woman, seconded from Moscow. Locked in a clash of cultures, the ill-balanced pair must confront an abductor who is at once deviously clever and bafflingly deranged.
