"Investigative Mania" by Elena Topilskaya, summary Automatic translate

"Investigation Mania" is a detective novel by Elena Topilskaya, published in 2015. The author is a former investigator with the St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office with many years of experience, and this is evident in every detail of the book: the daily routine of an investigation, the legal nuances, and the bureaucratic customs of the St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office are conveyed with the meticulous precision of someone who has lived it all from the inside. The book is part of the series about investigator Maria Shvetsova, one of the longest-running in the Russian detective genre. The same heroine is the basis for the popular television series "Secrets of the Investigation," for which Topilskaya wrote the scripts for the first eight seasons.

Argument at a birthday party

The story begins with Masha Shvetsova’s birthday party. Colleagues — investigators, detectives, forensic experts — had gathered at a party at her home, and the conversation gradually turned to crime solving. Criminal Investigation Officers Korablyov and Sintsov declared that missing persons cases were almost guaranteed to be a cold case. Masha countered: no one can vanish without a trace; any case can be solved if you really get to it. Her colleague and friend, investigator Lyosha Gorchakov, immediately took her up on it, and Masha couldn’t resist betting that she could take on the most challenging missing person and solve him.

The next morning, it turned out the dispute had reached the right ears: the city prosecutor’s office had sent her the case of Valery Nagorny’s disappearance — the most high-profile unsolved case of the year.

The Nagorny Case

Valery Vitalyevich Nagorny, 27, was a member of the regional Legislative Assembly and, concurrently, an active participant in an organized crime group led by Karasev. While the prosecutor’s office was preparing to charge him with large-scale timber speculation and seeking court approval for his arrest, Nagorny disappeared — literally on the eve of the prosecutor’s appeal hearing.

According to investigators, the day before his disappearance, he had lunch with his wife at the expensive Smaragd restaurant, located on a quiet side street of the St. Petersburg embankment. The security guard who came to pick up the chef found neither him nor his wife: both vanished mid-lunch, without even having their main course. Two weeks after her disappearance, the body of Nagorny’s wife was found in an abandoned concrete well near Bolsheokhtinskoye Cemetery, with a gunshot wound to the head. There was no longer any doubt that Nagorny was also dead. Or almost.

Bureaucratic labyrinths

The case was thrust upon Masha with the clear message that she should quietly suspend it and file it away. The district prosecutor gave her a practically direct order to do so, and the zonal prosecutor asked for a copy of the investigation plan along with the suspension order. Gorchakov explained to his friend that getting involved in this case was dangerous: deputies, politics, the mafia — and the prosecutor’s office was "beyond our level."

Masha, of course, read the case file anyway and began investigating. The interrogation reports turned out to be a dud: all three dozen witnesses described Nagorny with the same words: an honest citizen without enemies. Masha personally went to the Smaragd restaurant to figure out how to leave unnoticed — bypassing the bell above the door, the cloakroom attendant, and the security guards. It turned out that the cloakroom attendant had never been questioned.

Barracuda

At one point in the investigation, Masha is approached by a man named Kostya Barracuda — by all indications, a professional killer. He informs her that a plot is being hatched against him: they plan to plant a gun that will be used to kill Karasev, the leader of a criminal organization. Kostya is convinced that Nagorny is behind it all: he claims Nagorny is alive and continues to be active in criminal circles.

Masha is initially skeptical of this theory, but Barracuda insists: his source is professional intuition and observation of contacts in the criminal underworld. Kostya also declares that he intends not to kill corrupt operatives, but to outbid them — simply to offer more than their competitors. As they part, he asks Masha for protection. She doesn’t make a direct promise, but understands that Barracuda’s information is too closely tied to her investigation to ignore.

Bullets and provocation

A ballistics analysis yields a surprising result: both 5.6-caliber bullets — the one recovered from Marina Nagornaya’s body and the one found in Karasev’s murder case — were fired from the same weapon, most likely Margolin’s pistol. This overturns the investigators’ initial theory, which held that Nagorny’s wife was shot with a rifle from a distance.

Masha records a conversation between two men — Zakharov and Spivak — at the prosecutor’s office, who are trying to coerce her into cooperation, first promising money, then threatening her. The recording is clear. There are three voices on the tape, which can be identified in a laboratory. Masha refuses the offer and leaves, feeling the sights on her back — but no shot is fired.

Parallel lines

Throughout the book, Masha balances between official cases, of which she has more than she can handle, and Nagorny’s investigation, which no one is expecting. Her colleague Gorchakov — a loyal, if grumpy, companion — occasionally steals her change before payday, smashes the bumpers of other people’s cars in traffic, criticizes her methods, but never lets her down in critical moments. His personal story unfolds simultaneously: tired of his double life between his wife and colleague Zoya, he escapes to the empty prosecutor’s office on weekends, and misses his children.

Operative Korablyov from the UBOP, another regular source of Masha’s information, grumbles, coughs from a concussion, and shares information about the Karasev criminal community strictly within the framework of informal interactions. It is through him that Masha gains initial context: who Nagorny was in the criminal world, his connections, and his enemies.

Logic of the investigation

A picture gradually emerges: someone deliberately killed Nagorny and his wife, using a weapon that was then planned to be planted on Barracuda — to pin both murders on him. Masha advises Kostya to leave the city, while she continues to unravel the chain of events: sending materials for handwriting analysis of signatures at currency exchanges, searching for Nagorny’s wife’s green Audi, and searching for undocumented witnesses at Smaragda.