In the three years since the events of Child 44, Leo Demidov has established the Homicide Division within the KGB, which he uses to investigate what he calls "real crimes".

When Leo realises that Moskvin also committed suicide after being sent photographs of people he arrested, he deduces that someone is seeking retribution against the government and its agents for their crimes and that he himself is a target.

In the time since being sent to a forced-labour camp, Anisya has risen through the ranks of the vory v zakone to the point where she commands an entire band of criminals.

With the help of Frol Panin, a senior KGB agent, Leo and his friend Timur Nesterov travel to Kolyma 58—a notorious gulag in the Russian Far East—posing as a criminal and a guard with a plan to break Lazar out of prison and escort him back to Moscow.

Having realised her intense dislike for her adoptive father, Fraera inducts her to the vory, where she begins to bond with Malysh, a pickpocket.

Distraught, Leo realises that Fraera's plan was supported by Frol Panin and Soviet hardliners in the Kremlin who believe that On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences is an international embarrassment and its encouragement of discussion of Stalin's crimes among the population has weakened the government's authority.

However, he does not trust her, and admits the scheme to Leo, adding that Zoya is still alive and living with the vory in Budapest where they are trying to trigger an uprising among the population that will be thwarted by the occupying Soviet forces, further legitimising the Kremlin's position.

Fraera makes no attempt to hide herself from Leo, luring him in and holding him captive while she undermines the Soviet rule in Hungary and keeps turning Zoya against him.

[2] USA Today praised it as a "breathlessly paced", "explosive thriller", going "even further than [the] acclaimed Child 44 in capturing the mood of the Cold War-era Soviet Union".

Michael Harris, for the LA Times, stated that while "Smith remains a fiendishly intricate plotter", he found that "this is a routine thriller crammed so full of reversals that the life is squeezed out of the characters".

Harris goes on to note that "even the editing is slipshod", stating that "phrases such as "[l]owering his feet, the floor seemed to move" nag like the throbbing of a toothache"; he does, however, recognise that "this is a novel that really, really wants to be a movie".