Aaron Falk hates his origins. But there is always a reason for that animosity that can make you look back in absolute rejection. After all, what you are is to a large extent what you were with the precise drops of what you learned to be.
Falk's excuse for hatred for his land, a community in southeastern Australia, is made explicit in a thousand excuses about its endemic poverty, about the aggressiveness of its scorching climate and about the sadness of its people. But there is always something deeper that can lead you to hate the space in which you spent your first years, those in which the only complete and possible happiness should inhabit like an old ghost.
That remote happiness often has the appearance of old friends. Aaron Falk had in Luke Hadler that companion on which to evoke the few moments of happiness rescued from his dry motherland. When Luke dies with his entire family in an unfortunate case that points to patricide, Falk does not shy away from that part of responsibility that he feels as an investigator that he is and as an inseparable friend that he was.
No one in Kiewarra can stare at Falk without showing a hint of repudiation. The years pass and the popular imagination, instead of lowering the social condemnation, seems to have sustained the hatred for want of another task.
Falk is not comfortable, he wants to shed some light on Luke's death and get out of there in a few days. His friend's parents convince him not to abandon them. They intuit a buried truth that eludes them, and that, in the absence of giving back the life of their beloved son, could at least clear his name.
Working between intense emotions is something new for Falk, accustomed to the empirical method, to the persecution of criminals bent on defrauding the state and its citizens. Luke's death has nothing to do with it, but the first and slightest signs reach his investigator's nostrils and he will end up succumbing to the aroma of lies, of the hidden, of evil in short, always determined to destroy and deceive ...
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