A suspenseful new murder mystery set in a crumbling monastery-turned-Soviet prison in the early twentieth century. In a former monastery on an island in the White Sea, now taken over by the Bolsheviks, young mathematician Tolya Bogomolov is serving a three-year sentence, watched over by a skeleton crew of secret policemen. Some prisoners are consigned to forced labor while others sit at comfortable desks. So Tolya has been cultivating an acquaintance...

Lina is a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl. She paints, she draws, she gets crushes on boys. She's just like any other girl. Until one night in 1941, when Soviet officers barge into her home, tearing her family from the comfortable life they've known. Separated from her father, forced onto a crowded train car, Lina, her mother, and her young brother are taken slowly north to a Siberian work camp, where they are forced to dig for beets and fight for...

In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and brother are pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia, where her father is sentenced to death in a prison camp while she fights for her life, vowing to honor her family and the thousands like hers by burying her story in a jar on Lithuanian soil. Based on the author's family, includes a historical note.