A complicated investigation by the well-known character, Alex Varga (the protagonist, along with Alain Bec, in the author's detective series) leads the reader down secret paths into the Cuban black market for drugs, and to murky connections with certain spheres of power in this country and their relationship with the Latin American market for narcotics. The moral and social implications of all this, transferred to the environment of poverty on the margins of Havana society, constitute the central axis of this novel, which provides us again, according to Spanish critique, "with the agile, accurate and aggressive prose to which this writer has accustomed us".