Frozen Eden

The Karelia village of Kaisa is surrounded by impenetrable swamps, frozen lakes, and windswept wastelands. The locals have long since moved away, and the chances of encountering a person there are much lower than that of a solitary, emaciated bear or wolf. Moreover, in those places, there is a shrine with wooden idols—a spooky place that wanderers or geologists try to avoid. Somewhere in those areas, four years ago, a girl named Varvara Karpova disappeared. Her parents went to search for her—and they also vanished. The body of her mother was found with a gunshot wound, while her father went missing. The operational search group got stuck in the snowdrifts on their way to the shrine, but fortunately, they managed to reach the only inhabited cabin. There lived Tikhon Dikonov, a keeper of antiquities and creator of the local ethnographic museum, with his wife and four children. He agreed to help the investigators with the case and suggested visiting his neighbor—the hermit Kazubov, who resides at the shrine in a snow-covered hut…