About the book: 2022 / In the 20-30s of the last century, a wave of crime swept the country. Counter-revolutionary elements have raised their heads, banditry, murder and robbery are flourishing. Security officers from the OGPU-NKVD are engaged in a deadly battle with crime day and night...The south of Russia has been rocked by a series of brutal murders for ten years now. Bandits kill indiscriminately everyone - men, women, old and young. Serial murderers, having once tasted human blood, became like man-eating tigers - they want to drink it again and again. In the Rostov administration of the OGPU, the gang was dubbed “demons.” The case of the “demons” was entrusted to the young security officer Isai Apukhtin. I had just accepted the position when there were five new victims. And no leads. After several fruitless attempts to get on the trail of the mokrushki, the young security officer suddenly got lucky: a random witness said that at the Tikhoretskaya station he met two suspicious men. They allegedly hired workers for the state farm. But they behaved very strangely. From the photographs, the witness identified one of them - he turned out to be a seasoned swindler-tourist named Kolya Pop. Apukhtin began developing the gang with him.