The well-known metropolitan novelist of the detective genre Grigory Vetlugin, who already has 36 novels behind him, comes to the provincial town of Ogarkov on the instructions of the publishing house to meet with his readers. By the will of fate, he meets Anna Gureva there - a woman whom he dreamed of all his life. The terrifying visions that visit him from the scene of the murder with the participation of this woman aggravate and make this acquaintance mystical and fatal. She goes to jail on ch...