St. Petersburg, 1912. The progress of a new century is coming, but human nature does not change along with progress - people still take each other's lives, sometimes in the most terrible and incredible ways. Every time the metropolitan police, along with all their modern equipment (and there is already fingerprinting and much more), cannot cope with another terrible murder, the luminary of surgery, the 40-year-old professor of medicine Voskresensky, is called for help.