When Marta dies in Toulouse in 2004 and her will is read, her granddaughter Marthe hears with astonishment that Marta had a son during the Spanish Civil War who was given up for adoption and that she has to track him down. Marthe hires the detective Ricardo Cupido who finds him in Toledo: he is called a Alejandro, is extremely rich and is, in turn, father to an illegitimate daughter. However, Alejandro refuses to accept his origins and Marthe returns to Toulouse disappointed. A few days later, Alejandro's daughter is found gruesomely murdered, a death with hints of the Gothic, and he then decides to hire Cupido himself. Cupido's search will take readers to the heart of the property bubble, during that dazzling period when wealth seemed within anybody's reach, when new technologies were bursting onto the scene and ominous stories about the theft of children during the dictatorship began to come to light.