Military doctor General Klenski is arrested in Stalin's Russia in 1953 during an anti-Semitic political campaign accused of being a participant in so-called "doctors' plot".
The main character, an official of the 14th grade, Erast Petrovich Fandorin, serves as a clerk in the Detective Department and secretly dreams of becoming a detective. By the will of circumstances, he finds himself involved in the investigation of a mysterious suicide.
