When a diplomat at the Madagascan Embassy in Delhi is stabbed to death in seemingly scandalous and mysterious circumstances, the ambassador asks his old friend and fellow chess enthusiast, Jay Samorin, to help find the murderer as quickly and discretely as possible. Samorin is a man with a profound interest in the nature of evil and an unorthodox approach to criminal psychology. The Delhi police are also involved, and the Deputy Commissioner put in charge of the investigation is Anna Khan - recently transferred from Kashmir where her ruthless pursuit of suspected terrorists had threatened to cause a scandal. Wary of each other, Samorin and Khan each have highly personal reasons for their obsession with such crime: his father, a war hero, was hanged for the murder of his mother, while her husband was killed by Kashmiri Mujahedeen, and they become uneasy allies in the hunt for the killer. Untangling a web of corruption, medical malpractice and embezzlement of foreign aid, their quest takes them into the darker recesses of their own lives and beyond as they explore older, deeper mysteries that lie outside the more usual boundaries of a criminal investigation. The trail they follow is fraught with danger - a trail that leads them to the village of widows...