The slaughterman's daughter

The townsfolk of Motal, an isolated town in the Pale of Settlement, are shocked when Fanny Keismann - devoted wife, mother of 5, and celebrated cheese-maker - leaves her home at 2 hours past midnight and vanishes into the night. True, the husbands of Motal have been vanishing for years, but a wife and mother? What on earth possessed her? Could it have anything to do with Fanny's missing brother-in-law, who left her sister almost a year ago and ran away to Minsk, abandoning his family to destitution and despair? Or could Fanny have been lured away by Zizek Breshov, the mysterious ferryman on the Yaselda river, who, in a strange twist of events, seems to have disappeared on the same night? Surely there can be no link between Fanny and the peculiar roadside murder on the way to Telekhany, which has left Colonel Piotr Novak, head of the Russian secret police, scratching his head.