is a mystery thriller surrounding clandestine activities on Voz Island in the desiccating Aral Sea of Kazakhstan, when Ayan Kazbekov was growing up in a fishing village by the Aral in Soviet time. When two locals are murdered while taking a couple of strangers to the now-abandoned Voz Island in the post-Soviet era, Ayan and his friend Grace, the wife of an American expatriate, are incited to decipher a coded note secretly passed to Ayan before the fall of the Soviet Union by Victor, his Russian scientist friend from their university days in Moscow. Victor is not heard from again, but his note may hold clues not only to solving the locals' murders but also thwarting life-threatening dangers to humankind.