Costas Haritos, a CID chief in central Athens, is uncomfortably married, aggressive and pessimistic, and only manages to relax when he is at home reading his English dictionaries. A veteran of the force, he is only now coming to terms with the pervasive corruption in public and private life since the fall of the military dictatorship and the advent of democratic government.

When an Albanian couple is found brutally slaughtered, it looks like an open and shut crime of passion. But when Yanna, a TV journalist investigating the same case, is murdered in a broadcasting studio just before going on air, Haritos begins to think he's missing something crucial in this seemingly simple case. Why was she so interested in whether the police had found evidence of the presence of children at the Albanians' home? When Yanna's successor at the TV station is also murdered, Haritos finds himself sucked ever deeper into the grubby world of the Greek media and the shadowy underworld of international child trafficking.