IN FYODOR Dostoyevsky's masterpiece Crime And Punishment, an impoverished Russian student living in St Petersburg in 1865 murders a greedy and grasping old woman with an axe.

Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov persuades himself the murder is morally justified because of the misery the old moneylender has brought on her victims, and the good he could do with the money he steals.

But the reality of the bloody murder - and the fact he's forced into murdering the old woman's idiot sister too - preys on his mind and eats away at his soul, until his eventual arrest comes as a merciful relief.

The investigating magistrate who relentlessly hounds Raskolnikov into a confession is one Porfiry Petrovich.

Ice cool, shrewd and calculating, he's one of literature's great detectives: a man whose apparent coolness and indifference to the feelings of others hides a philosopher's belief in the superiority of good over evil.

In this great sequel' to Crime And Punishment, Morris follows Porfiry on his next murder investigation.

It is midwinter 1866. In St Petersburg's snowbound Petrovsky Park, two frozen bodies are found. One is the crushed and mutilated body of a dwarf, crammed into a suitcase; the other, that of the burly peasant who apparently killed him before committing suicide.

But all is not as it seems. Porfiry's investigation takes him deep into the sprawling, squalid tenements, brothels and drinking dens of St Petersburg's slums. There he meets a desperate young mother providing for her daughter by working as a prostitute.

Suddenly, however, the investigation takes a new turn - into the salons of Petersburg's upper classes, and an encounter with a sinister publishing magnate and a scandal long kept quiet.

Morris has dug deep into the Russian soul in this book, and his dark, dank, dangerous St Petersburg, with its snowbound, windswept streets and stinking slums, is brilliantly recreated.

The hunt for the murderer is tense and atmospheric: the denouement brutally shocking and moving.

A worthy sequel to one of the greatest novels ever written: and a cracking thriller in its own right.