Tricase, lower Salento, is a blood red sky that looks out at sunset over the quiet waters of the Adriatic. A merciless, beautiful and uncontaminated land that welcomes and in its soft belly the murder of two young women. A sixteen-year-old student from a humble family and the problematic and innocent daughter of a big shot of the local mafia. Two women who could not be more distant, both raped, violated and killed by gunshots. Because that's how it works: it is never the guilty who fall.

It is the beginning of a ballad full of bitterness and anger that seems to unload the blame on the fragile shoulders of Jesse James, a drug-addicted bluesman who walks with shadows on him. But Inspector Alex Brando does not believe it. The smell of death leads in a completely different direction. Alex, an inspector with a dark and never-overcome past, is determined to track down the murderer even if it means digging alone in the dense and dark waters of a wild and corrupt environment. And by dint of scratching the rotten crust of southern society, Moloch Kinasky pops out, a product of the worst social garbage. A ruthless and diabolical man, who stinks of sulfur and hell, ready to challenge Inspector Brando in a long and exhausting game of massacre that will bring out all his never-buried demons.

But there is still light under the Salento sky, and if the earth remains bent by the wounds of a violent history, written with the whip on the backs of the poor people, and engraved through a social segregation more alive than ever, there are Brando and the faithful Nico Boscolo, a ruined former policeman and part-time investigator. The most close-knit detective couple in the south once again fighting to give voice to the last, to those whose mouths they wanted to shut forever.

A gripping noir novel. A pair of unforgettable, tender and implacable characters. A thriller that will keep you glued to the pages. A story of love and death in which the past merges with the present in a dreamlike, thrilling atmosphere.