Between July 1998 and February 2000, a fifteen-member criminal syndicate terrorized Almaty, Kazakhstan, committing twenty-nine murders across the city's informal sex-work corridors and the rural clearings of the surrounding districts. Led by Alexander Suvorov - a career recidivist known by the underworld alias Borman - the gang combined organized prostitution, armed robbery, and systematic sadomasochistic torture into a predatory enterprise that operated for eighteen months before law enforcement recognized it as a serial series at all.

Borman is the full account of one of the most unusual and devastating criminal cases in post-Soviet history. It traces the gang's formation in the ruins of the Soviet planned economy, the Afghan heroin trade that reorganized its members' physiology and criminal economy, and the institutional failures of a fragmented law enforcement apparatus that allowed twenty-nine people to die before a single arrest was made on homicide charges. It examines, with unflinching analytical precision, the psychology of collective predation, the gendered dynamics of a mixed-membership killing organization, and the specific vulnerability of the marginalized women who became its targets.

Drawing on the case's thirteen-volume evidentiary docket and the investigative record of Operation Nekhristi, this is narrative nonfiction at its most searching - a study of violence, institutional failure, and the human cost of a society in collapse.