Welcome to Roslazny—a sleepy Russian town where intrigue and murder combine to disturb the icy silence....

Olga Pushkin, Railway Engineer (Third Class) and would-be best-selling author, spends her days in a little rail-side hut with only Dmitri the hedgehog for company. While tourists and travellers clatter by on the Trans-Siberian Express, Olga dreams of studying literature at Tomsk State University—the Oxford of West Siberia—and escaping the sleepy, snow-clad village of Roslazny.

But Roslazny doesn't stay sleepy for long. Poison-pen letters, a small-town crime wave and persistent rumours of a Baba Yaga—a murderous witch hiding in the frozen depths of the Russian taiga—combine to disturb the icy silence. And one day Olga arrives at her hut only to be knocked unconscious by a man falling from the Trans-Siberian, an American tourist with his throat cut from ear to ear and his mouth stuffed with 10-ruble coins. Another death soon follows, and Sergeant Vassily Marushkin, the brooding, enigmatic policeman who takes on the case, finds himself falsely imprisoned by his Machiavellian superior, Chief-Inspector Babikov.

Olga resolves to help Vassily by proving his innocence. But with no leads to follow and time running out, has Olga bitten off more than she can chew?