Imagine St. Petersburg in the end of the 19th century. In the absurd and gloomy atmosphere of the tsarist Russia’s old capital - where rumours spread faster than a wolf runs along Nevsky Prospect – Ivan Putilin, a crafty local detective, takes on a case of a notorious foreign diplomat murder. These are the settings of a masterfully stylised retro-detective story Harlequin’s Costume by Leonid Yuzefovich, the first volume in a series whose hero is based on the real-life Ivan Putilin, the Chief of St. Petersburg Police 1866-1892. Present novel, brilliantly translated by Marian Schwartz, revolves around the real murder case taken by the author from the diaries of the famous detective. The beauty of this book is in the fact that it’s up to the reader to find out who is who in this “Dostoevskian” city and as it is told by famous Russian critic Leo Danilkin: “Sieving through the text and separating the truth from the literature in it is the real pleasure derived from Yuzefovich’s work.”