Vladimir Grigoryev
This is Peter. Not Petersburg, not Leningrad - namely, Peter. A city of big ambitions and opportunities. As a rule, unrealized. Often they joke that there is a particular climate to blame. As if he makes us all a bit lazy and unhurried, and turns the city into an endless northern Magnan. But let's be honest: if the weather was good here, you would have moved here. So thank you, Lord, for the right climate! Peter is first of all people. No museums, no cathedrals or movable bridges. People - this is the present. They fill the city with meaning. Make it alive. Rock musicians and street artists, businessmen and careerists, conductor, cooks, officials, urban madmen, just visiting. Everything is interesting here. Uneasy ... All yours. City swallows.
The story unfolds in St. Petersburg during the season of White Nights, when night becomes curiously indistinguishable from day. Masha has struck it lucky: she is about to wed an American, Tim, eager to bring home a beautiful Russian wife. This marriage can take her light-years beyond her simple provincial roots, but for now Masha has a family to take care of, and she dutifully sends all the wages she earns to them. To save money she even dupes her fiancée by returning the expensive wedding dress he has bought for her to the boutique and sawing an identical one for herself. The night before the wedding Masha hastens to meet Tim, but fails to make it to the other side of the River Neva before the drawbridge is raised. The betrothed find themselves standing on the pavement with the mighty river between them...
In the near future, writer Victor Banev gets himself on a UN commission to investigate what's going on in the remote town of Tashlinsk, where reports tell of a virus-created race of brainiac mutants. Banev's tween daughter Ira is enrolled at a school for gifted children which has been taken over by the mutants, who have grown to despise ordinary humanity.
