A new challenge for criminologist Milena Lukin, inspired by real-life crimes with fateful consequences and set in Belgrade, a city in flux, between East and West.

Still today bouquets of white lilies-of-the-valley are laid in Belgrade Street, where a small Romani boy was once beaten to death by two youths. One of the teenagers was imprisoned, while the other was able to flee. Twenty-five years later, he returns to Belgrade to confront his past – and is found dead in the Danube river a short while later. The police declare it to be a suicide and promptly close the case. The lawyer of the dead man and criminologist Milena Lukin find themselves confronted by a puzzle – that is, until they stumble upon a clue which leads them into the darkest recesses of Serbian politics, and to a murder which shaped the fate of an entire country.

On the night of the 11th of July, two guardsmen from the Serbian elite unit are making their rounds in the Topcider military camp. The next morning, they are found dead. The military court issues an official report claiming that they were the victims of a dishonourable ritual suicide, and the investigation is promptly closed. Lawyer Sinisa Stojkovic is commissioned by the parents of the dead guardsmen to launch a private investigation. He asks his old friend, Milena Lukin, a specialist in international law, for her assistance. But her investigations start to irritate certain individuals, and her life ends up in grave danger. A dreadful suspicion begins to build: it seems that the guards saw something they shouldn't have seen. Could it have had something to do with the anniversary of the worst massacre in European history since World War II?

»Only here does the peony bloom in such strong shades of red, because the ground was soaked in so much blood.« What happened on the night when a Serbian couple were brutally murdered in their house in Kosovo? Milena Lukin might never have looked into the matter if her uncle Miodrag had not recognized the murdered woman as his first love. She contacts the couple’s children and ventures to the scene of the crime – and into the dark depths of politics. Gradually, she comes to suspect that the killers are not from far away, but very close to her, in beautiful Belgrade. Peony Red tells a story of how the flames of political conflict are fanned and kept alive behind the scenes because Serbs and Kosovars profit from that conflict.