A corpse has been discovered in a lake in Film City, the Hollywood of India, where film stars always guarantee fresh material for scandal. The victim has been so badly mutiliated that it is impossible to identify the body as male or female, let alone give it a name. An outsider in his own land, with a British father and a feminist mother, George Sansi, who may be the only honest policeman in Bombay, is given the case. As he painstakingly follows up every clue, a shocking portrait of evil emerges. And Sansi is pulled into a political imbroglio from which his career may never recover . . . if he lives so long.