Samson Kolechko has been assigned a most perplexing case - though it is mostly perplexing because it's hard to understand why selling the meat of one's own pig constitutes a crime.

But apparently it does, and at the insistence of the Chekist secret police officer assigned to "reinforce" the Lybid police station, Samson does his diligent - if diffident - best.

Yet no sooner has he got started than his live-in fiancée Nadezhda is abducted by striking railway workers who object to the census she's carrying out. And when you factor in a mysterious thief in the police station itself, a deadly tram accident that may have been pre-meditated, and the potential reappearance of the culprit in the case of the silver bone, it's no wonder the "meat case" takes a back seat.

But it is in the pursuit of that petty-fogging, seemingly mundane matter that Samson's fate lies - and Nadezhda's too, for the two are inextricably entwined.