The end of 1950. A young American army colonel, Frank Bolton, returns from the Korean War, having lost an arm. As soon as he returns to his hometown, he learns that all his former lovers are dying in terrible agony. If only he could have guessed who the killer would be! If only he could escape his fate! But there's nowhere to go.

Boris Vian came up with a plot in the spirit of Vernon Sullivan, wrote four chapters, and left the novel unfinished. One hundred years after the writer's birth, his heirs invited the literary association OULIPO (Increasing Literary Potency) to write a sequel. The OULIPO authors agreed and created a new detective story, playing charades with both the author and the readers. For the first time in Russian, following the French edition, which became a literary sensation at home.