A summary of Elena Topilskaya’s "Fatal Role"

"Fatal Role" is a detective novel by Elena Topilskaya, published in 2003. Written in the first person, the book’s narrator and protagonist is Maria Sergeevna Shvetsova, an investigator with the St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office, a woman with a keen mind, a caustic sense of humor, and a busy working life. Topilskaya is a practicing lawyer and a high-profile investigator, lending the story an authenticity: the professional details and atmosphere of the prosecutor’s office are conveyed without embellishment.

The book is part of the author’s series about Maria Shvetsova, which has been published under various titles, including "Secrets of the Investigation." The popular television series "Secrets of the Investigation" is based on this series.

An ordinary day with an extraordinary visitor

The story begins on an ordinary workday: Masha Shvetsova is forced to wear her uniform jacket — her only decent skirt has been torn during a leg-lifting contest on the prosecutor’s office steps. Her boss, Vladimir Ivanovich, seizing the opportunity and skillfully turning the request into a compliment, assigns Masha to cover for her colleague Larisa Kochetova at an evening citizen’s reception.

While Masha is on duty, a young woman in a polka-dot dress enters the office — theater actress Tatyana Viktorovna Klimanova. It takes Masha a moment to recognize her: she played the lead role in the film adaptation of Andron Latkovsky’s thriller "Heart in a Fist" — a novel about a mysterious killer stalking an actress, initially harassing her with late-night phone calls. Klimanova explains that since her divorce from Latkovsky, she’s been living alone, hearing footsteps in the attic above the top floor, and receiving calls at night when the line is silent. Masha is forced to explain that criminal law doesn’t allow anyone to be held accountable for not answering the phone, and the only advice is to install caller ID. Klimanova leaves upset.

Physical evidence and a broken leg

While Masha ponders the actress’s visit, the prosecutor demands that evidence in the construction case — a heavy piece of concrete slab with protruding rebar — be removed from the office. Masha’s colleague and friend, investigator Alexei Gorchakov, takes on the task of moving it. An attempt to move the block ends disastrously: Lyosha slips and ends up under the concrete. An ambulance takes him away with a broken leg.

A personal catastrophe immediately turns into a professional one: all of Gorchakov’s affairs are transferred to Masha — both the business ("economic") ones, which she detests, and the actual criminal ones. Masha takes the bags containing Lyosha’s "inheritance" to the hospital; together they sort through the files, and among other things, a comical complaint from the Prosecutor General’s Office emerges — in it, a letter from a barely literate grandfather about the Kirovets tractor used by drunken police officers to bury the body of a guard was misread, leading to the invention of a certain "citizen Chernobylskaya A.S." (Grandfather was referring to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant).

Death of an actress

Returning from the hospital, Masha finds a police UAZ at the prosecutor’s office: she’s been summoned to the scene of a crime. A body has been discovered in the apartment. When Masha clears a crowd of officials from the scene and enters the room, she sees Tatyana Klimanova on the floor — the same actress who had come to see her a few hours earlier. Empty bottles of diphenhydramine lie nearby, and on the dressing table is a piece of paper with the phrase, "Nobody loves me, I must die." This very phrase was the key one in Latkovsky’s thriller — it was spoken by the killer stalking the actress.

The film looks like a suicide — a frightened, lonely woman has taken too many sleeping pills. But Masha can’t shake the feeling that what’s happening is too closely reproducing the plot of Latkovsky’s book, which Klimanova herself adapted for the screen.

A parallel case and a mysterious detainee

That same night, a body with a fractured skull is found in one of the city’s building entrances. Nearby is a drunk man, covered in someone else’s blood. The officers identify him using an ID found in his jacket pocket: a certain Burov, a former detective. Forensic expert Boris Panov, upon examining the man, determines that there are no signs of bleeding — the blood is not his own. Masha notes that there are no traces of blood on the soles of his shoes either, despite the considerable amount of blood that had pooled in the entrance hall.

A thread from the past

That night, returning home to her son Gosha after his birthday party, Masha picks up the phone and hears the same silent breathing Klimanova described. The call is untraceable. Panicked, Masha locks herself in the bathroom with her cell phone, trying to contact the front desk to determine the source of the call, but to no avail.

Later, looking through Burov’s notebook — an old diary from two years ago — Masha discovers a page she missed the first time she flipped through it: two sheets stuck together. Peeling them apart, she reads on one of them, carefully underlined and written in tiny letters, a phrase: "Nobody loves you, you must die." The very same phrase from Klimanova’s suicide note. The very same one Masha heard on the phone that night. And the very same one that was in Latkovsky’s book.

Burov is a former detective who lost his wife, Lilia, two years ago. According to a copy of the forensic report tucked into his diary, Lilia died from blunt force trauma to the left side of the chest, her body found on the riverbank. Burov was detained on suspicion of murdering his wife but released without charge. Since then, he has deteriorated: he was caught drunk next to a body with a fractured skull. Masha understands: Burov saw the suicide note in Klimanova’s apartment and kept silent. He knew that phrase before anyone else. Why?

So two deaths – one that looks like a suicide, the other like a murder – and one silent phone call are connected into a single knot that Masha Shvetsova has yet to unravel.