"Remember Death" by Elena Topilskaya, summary Automatic translate

This detective novel by Elena Topilskaya, a St. Petersburg prosecutor and writer, was published in the 1990s and is written in the first person. The protagonist, Maria Shvetsova, a senior investigator with twelve years of experience, handles several cases simultaneously, and her professional and personal lives are constantly intertwined. The novel is notable for the author’s many years of experience as an investigator in St. Petersburg, and the daily routines of the prosecutor’s office, the morgue, and the criminal investigation department are described with documentary accuracy.

The book is part of a series about investigator Shvetsova. Other books in the series include "The Prosecutor," "Until the Last Breath," and several other works by Topilskaya featuring the same heroine.

Double body

It all begins on November 2: Shvetsova, along with forensic expert Gruzdev and young detective Kolya, goes to a scheduled exhumation. They need to open the grave of pensioner Raisa Bronislavovna Petrenko, who was buried without an autopsy that summer — medical records indicated stage three cancer. However, in the fall, a confession came from her nephew in Ukraine: he had smothered the old woman with a pillow after an argument over money for alcohol, and then suffered for three months.

When workers lift the coffin, they discover something unexpected: there are two bodies inside. Besides Petrenko, there’s a naked male corpse, apparently thirty-five or so years old, without any identification or clothing. Shvetsova decides to take the coffin containing both bodies to the city morgue.

The Morgue and the Mystery of the "Foundling"

At the morgue, Shvetsova is met by Yuri Yuryevich, the head of the thanatology department and a longtime acquaintance from her intern years. He performs an autopsy on the unknown individual and comes to a strange conclusion: the internal organs are intact, there are no obvious injuries, and the cause of death cannot be immediately determined. Patches of skin have been removed from the body’s thighs — possibly tattoos. The fingers are well preserved enough to allow fingerprints to be taken. However, the deceased’s teeth are flawless, without a single filling, which is puzzling.

At the same time, Gruzdev confirms that the old woman Petrenko was indeed strangled, which completely corresponds to her nephew’s testimony. This part of the case is clear.

The Vanishing Corpse

For several days, Shvetsova has been trying to figure out who "planted" the second body in the coffin and where it went. When she goes to the morgue to check the records, the logbook shows no record of a body being received from Department 89. Orderly Vasya Kulbin, a generous man who sympathizes with Masha, promises to call if a body turns up. But there’s no call that day or on the weekend.

The next blow: geneticist Semyon Efimovich, who exhumed Arseny Lebedev for the paternity case, categorically denies that there were two bodies in the coffin. The conversation with him turns sharp: the expert is offended by the very question. An operative from Department 89 also shows Shvetsova the incident log, which contains no mention of a summons to the cemetery.

Regina and the Lebedev case

Late one night, Shvetsova’s school friend Regina Schneider, an impulsive woman, twice widowed, and invariably a magnet for trouble, arrives unannounced. Regina informs her that she and her new fiancé, Serzh, have filed for marriage, but the parents of her late husband, Arseny, the Lebedev family, are threatening to prove that her sons, Vadik and Gerik, are not Arseny’s children. It was during this legal battle that Lebedev’s exhumation for DNA testing was initiated. Regina claims that when her husband’s grave was opened, it contained the body of a woman — it is this information that prompts Shvetsova to launch an investigation.

However, when Masha comes to Regina’s house in the morning and asks her directly, she looks genuinely perplexed: she never said anything of the sort. Shvetsova is stumped: either she’s been tricked, or she has serious memory issues.

The investigator’s personal life

Masha’s story runs through the entire narrative: six months ago, she left her husband, taking her son Gosha with her. Her mother, unforgiving of the divorce, remained with her former son-in-law. Their friend Masha, whose apartment they now share, is seriously injured and undergoing treatment in an American clinic. Her investigator’s salary barely covers school, a swimming pool, and English lessons for Gosha, and Shvetsova is learning to manage her own budget for the first time in her life.

At the same time, she’s handling the case of Edik Sobolev, a young intellectual from a good family who cold-bloodedly murdered a forty-year-old woman with forty-two knife stabs. Singer Igor Valchuk, whose niece Malvina is involved in a separate case, shows up at the prosecutor’s office, and his visit causes quite a stir among his fellow investigators.

Death of an Expert

Gena Strumin, a young forensic expert who had performed five hundred autopsies this year and celebrated it loudly, was found dead in the entryway of his own building: his head had been crushed by a heavy object, his pockets had been picked. Officially, it was a typical robbery. But Shvetsova recalls his drunken words at the funeral of surgeon Netochkin and asks another expert, Marina Korotaeva, to compare the injuries to Gena’s skull with those of Netochkin himself — the surgeon who had died shortly before the surgeon who was scheduled to operate on the wife of the head surgeon, Yurochka. The connections between the deaths begin to form a frightening chain, and Masha confesses to her colleague, Gorchakov: "I’m scared."