Cosmonaut Tsimion Vladovka's last recorded words aboard the Mir space station were instructions to contact Rostnikov if something went wrong with the mission. Now Vladovka is missing. He may have defected. He may have been kidnapped. He may have committed suicide or simply gone mad and run away. What is certain is that he possesses secrets that are not safe to keep.

Movie director Yuri Kriskov has completed production on the greatest epic ever in Russian cinema, a grand work on the life of Tolstoy. Then a demented chess fanatic steals the negatives and demands two million dollars in hard American cash, threatening to destroy the film stock and kill Kriskov. And managing to always stay one gambit ahead of both filmmaker and police.

Dr. Andrei Vanga leads a center for paranormal research-until he is violently murdered. Rostnikov and his partner Emil Karpov-whose Marxist, rational mind remains resolutely earthbound-must find a killer where awesome powers lurk beneath a world of dreams.

The New York Times hailed it as "imaginative." The Washington Post Book World called its author "remarkably versatile and dependable."  Publishers Weekly named its most recent installment, The Dog Who Bit a Policeman, one of the top five mysteries of the year. Here Stuart M. Kaminsky's Edgar Award-winning series featuring Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov continues in a tour de force with not just one, but three mysteries to baffle the mind and confound the soul. FALL OF A COSMONAUT Post-Yeltsin Russia is a place where law governs neither nature nor man...a place where a brief, sudden storm can blow an iron bench down a city street...and where a trio of investigations toying with all the known conventions of science and art await persistent and almost always fearless Porfiry Rostnikov, chief inspector in the Office of Special Investigations of the Moscow Police. Cosmonaut Tsimion Vladovka's last recorded words aboard the Mir space station were instructions to contact Rostnikov if something went wrong with the mission. Now Vladovka is missing. He may have defected. He may have been kidnapped. He may have committed suicide or simply gone mad and run away. What is certain is that he possesses secrets that are not safe to keep. Movie director Yuri Kriskov has completed production on the greatest epic ever in Russian cinema, a grand work on the life of Tolstoy. Then a demented chess fanatic steals the negatives and demands two million dollars in hard American cash, threatening to destroy the film stock and kill Kriskov. And managing to always stay one gambit ahead of both filmmaker and police. Dr. Andrei Vanga leads a center for paranormal research-until he is violently murdered. Rostnikov and his partner Emil Karpov-whose Marxist, rational mind remains resolutely earthbound-must find a killer where awesome powers lurk beneath a world of dreams. Of course, these wildly different cases have absolutely nothing in common-or do they? To find out, Rostnikov will wade ever deeper into the thick and murky no-man's-land that is the new Russia-where at every turn often bitter, always shocking surprises ambush even the sanest and strongest.