Andy Chapman, Rome correspondent for a London daily, is intrigued by the brutal murder of a left wing priest, particularly when he discovers that an emissary from the Vatican had cleared his apartment of papers when his body was discovered but before the police were called. He turns this piece of information over to the investigating magistrate, Elena Fiorini, who inadvertently reveals to him that she is under pressure from her superiors not to pry too deeply into the motives for the killing. Such pressure only increases both Elena's and Chapman's desire to find out precisely what happened and why, a quest which leads them into the bowels of the Vatican's archives, to a clandestine meeting of a banned political party and back to the last days of Mussolini's dictatorship, when people changed their identities but only pretended to shift their allegiances.

A taut and serpentine thriller in the tradition of Robert Harris, in which the eternal city is as much a character as the people who inhabit it.