After months in the hospital healing from wounds sustained in a car bomb attack in Sicily, Aurelio Zen of Rome’s elite Criminalpol, presumed dead, is lying low under a false name at a beach resort on the Tuscan coast. Biding his time until he’s summoned to the States to testify in an imminent anti-Mafia trial, he has nothing to do but enjoy the orderly and undemanding world of a classic Italian beach holiday. Until he notices that an inordinate number of people — each of whom might have been mistaken for Zen himself — have been dropping dead around him.