Santiago, a doctor in charge of the accident and emergency department of a large hospital in Madrid, is enjoying a well-earned holiday after the stress of the first year of the COVID pandemic. He is travelling to Breda with his wife and son. This tiny city in Extremadura is where he first practiced medicine twenty years ago. A few days later he turns up dead - murdered - and his widow contacts the veteran private-eye, Cupido, to investigate the death. Cupido has himself just been through a bad patch professionally after having failed to resolve his last case (a traffic accident in which a pregnant young woman died), and as he delves into this new case he finds that first he needs to discover whether the reasons for the murder lie in the present or a past trying to reassert itself. Fuentes returns to his old stamping ground in this novel full of surprising twists, crossed by mysteries that intertwine.