Kline, a former Los Angeles police officer turned private detective, is hired by a powerful pharmaceutical conglomerate boss to investigate in Asia the disappearance of his only son, Shitao, whom he has not seen in person since the boy was ten. Now in his 30s, Shitao has gone missing in the Philippines where he had been helping in an orphanage.

While hunting a cultured, intelligent and vicious psychopath, Inspector Amaldi comes face to face with the physical and moral decay of his city as well as the ghosts of his own past.

In a Spain consumed by ambition and power, the future of an empire depends of the mind state of a single woman.