When Commissario Guido Brunetti is visited by a young bureaucrat concerned to investigate the lack of official approval for the building of his apartment years before, his first reaction, like any other Venetian, even a cop, is to think of whom he knows who might bring pressure to bear on the relevant local government department. But when the bureaucrat rings him at work, clearly scared by some information he plans to give Brunetti, and is then found dead after a fall from scaffolding, something is clearly going on that has implications rather greater than the fate of Guido's own apartment. Brunetti's investigations take him into unfamiliar areas of Venetian life - drug abuse and loan-sharking - while the deaths of two young drug addicts and the arrest - and subsequent release - of a suspected drug-dealer, reveal, once again, what a difference it makes in Venice to have friends in high places.