Siberia, land of hope and desperation. A place of unimaginable wealth, and unimaginable greed. Against this backdrop, Gregori Nowek, the mayor of the small river town of Markovo, is ordered to investigate the killing of three men. Two of them are members of his own militia. The third is Andrei Ryzkhov, a man who has made a fortune from an American-financed oil exploration deal. The investigation leads Nowek into a labyrinth of deception and ends with a terrible discovery: an old horror, long thought dead, has reemerged amid the frozen wastes of Siberia.