About the book: 2006 / The writer Katerina Vrublevskaya and her heroine Apollinaria Avilova are almost the same person. When Katerina Vrublevskaya writes a detective novel, she herself becomes Apollinaria Lazarevna Avilova - a free, educated, emancipated, intelligent, erotic, insightful young woman of the late 19th century - and begins to investigate mysteries - bloody, fatal, puzzling, unexpected mysteries, also of the late 19th century. In the novel “The Case of the Ancient Portrait,” the widowed Polina Avilova... falls in love again. Her friend, a young artist Andrei Protasov, leaves for Paris and mysteriously disappears. Avilova goes to France. She meets Parisian bohemians (Toulouse-Lautrec and other artists), enters into difficult relationships with the police, attempts are made on her life, but Polina brings the investigation to the end and reveals the secret of the life and death of the Russian artist.