The Shadow over Leningrad

By Leigh Kimmel

In Stalin's Soviet Union, Tikhon Grigoriev lives a precarious life. He knows too much. He's seen too much. A single misstep could destroy him, and if he stumbles, he will take his family down with him. With Leningrad besieged by Nazi armies, the danger has only increased. He's not a man who wants to come to the notice of those in high places. But when he solved a murder that seemed supernatural, impossible, he attracted the attention of Leningrad's First Party Secretary. So when a plot of land grows vegetables of unusual size and vigor, and anyone who eats them goes mad, who should be called upon to solve the mystery but Tikhon Grigoriev. However, these secrets could get him far worse than a bullet in the head. For during the White Nights the boundaries between worlds grow thin, and in some of those worlds humanity can have no place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Starship Cat Press
• Release date: Feb 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215696378

Book preview

A stiff sea breeze blew in off the Gulf of Finland. Any other time Tikhon Grigoriev would've welcomed it, since the salt-tanged air offered a modicum of relief from the miasma of death which hung over besieged Leningrad.

Today that breeze left a metallic tang on his teeth and set his nerves on edge. Now and again Grigoriev would look in the direction of the German lines, wondering if the Nazis had deployed some new secret weapon. As a member of Leningrad's militsia, the regular police, Grigoriev heard all the rumors a terrified populace could spin up while standing in line for their daily bread ration. The latest included tales of devils summoned to do the Hitlerites' bidding.

Grigoriev knew that, as a member in good standing of the Communist Party, he ought not give credence to superstition. However, the past six months had set his faith in dialectical materialism to teetering. Not just the ordinary horrors of war, the deaths and dismemberments, the slow starvation of an entire city. He'd seen hard evidence that this world contained things the likes of which no Party theoretician knew, for which Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism could offer no explanation.

He also knew that speculating about such matters was a waste of precious energy. He might be eating better now that the desperate winter had ended, but the vegetables Leningraders grew in every patch of dirt could only go so far to nourish its population. And it was to just such a vegetable patch that his current complaint called him, an accusation that a neighbor had stolen produce from it.

Just yesterday there was a cabbage this big. The citizen, an older woman by the name of Borisova, forename and patronymic Irina Andreevna, cupped her hands to indicate something closer to the size he once would've expected a potato. Today it was gone. Just the stump of the stalk where they cut it right off.

Such an accusation could get someone killed. Food-related crimes went to military tribunals that often handled cases by the simple expedient of summary execution. It made for one fewer mouth to feed.

Why can't I shake the suspicion that she's quarreled with this family and is looking to make trouble for them?

Was it just their name, which suggested a Jewish origin? Or was it the unnatural intensity of the woman's eyes as she made her accusation?

Grigoriev had seen plenty of desperate eyes the previous winter, as starvation stalked his native city. But these were not the listless eyes grown huge in a face stripped of all flesh that marked a person in the last throes of starvation. Wide, yes, but wild with an energy she shouldn't be able to muster.

"I know they took