The book provides a detailed description of "the Russian crime of the twenty-first century" as well as a thorough examination of the eighty sessions of the nine-month-long trial (during 2016-2017) of Boris Nemtsov's alleged killers. It directs attention to the chief obstacle in determining what precisely happened shortly before midnight on February 27, 2015, on a bridge located a mere stone's throw away from the Kremlin, in an area under the active surveillance of the Russian Federal Protective Service. The glaring absence of closed circuit videos from this most heavily guarded site in Russia is underscored. Given the absence of such key evidence, those seeking to investigate the murder have been akin to blind people stumbling about in obscurity. The attempts to penetrate this man-made fog undertaken during the course of the trial by the Nemtsov family attorneys, Vadim Prokhorov and Olga Mikhailova, as well as by numerous tenacious analysts of the crime, such as former deputy Russian energy minister Vladimir Milov, former Russian presidential economics advisor Andrei Illarionov, and leading mathematician Andrei Piontkovskii, are covered in full. The uneven case mounted by the prosecution and the scrappy defense effort of the attorneys for the alleged killers, many of them ethnic Chechens, are highlighted, as is the non-unanimous verdict which was reached by the twelve jurors. The findings of this study are in agreement with those of a number of commentators who contend that the actual organizers of the crime remain at large as does the assassination's shadowy mastermind.

Dr. John B. Dunlop is Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University. Among his books are The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton UP 1983), The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton UP 1995), Russia Confronts Chechnya (Cambridge UP 1998), The 2002 Dubrovka and 2004 Beslan Hostage Crises (ibidem 2006), and The Moscow Bombings of September 1999 (ibidem 2014). His essays have appeared in, among other journals, Demokratizatsiya, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Journal of Democracy, Journal of Cold-War Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, and Survival.