The events of the novel Stones Don't Bear Witness take place at the beginning of the 20th century in Czarist Russia. In the provincial town of Dubossary, a young Christian boy, Mikhail Ribachenko, is murdered under mysterious circumstances. The local peasants accuse the local Jews of the murder, which is supposedly for ritual purposes. The anti-Semitic press, with Pavolaki Krushevan, the editor of Bessarabets (The Bessarabian) in the lead, blows the case out of proportion throughout Russia. An agent of the secret police is sent to Kishinev; making use of the overheated state of Christian-Jewish relations, he is able to instigate a bloody anti-Jewish pogrom. The writer, Boris Sandler, relying on documents found in the governmental archives of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kishinev, carries out his own investigation of those long-ago events. The book is written in the form of a historical detective novel.