Reeling from a deadly bombing in Venice and her investigative partner Dante’s disappearance, Detective Colomba Caselli retreats to the rural countryside outside Rome to nurse her wounds. When an apparently autistic teenager appears in her yard, covered in blood, he leads her to a brutal crime scene where nothing is what it seems. As Colomba gets pulled into the investigation and the body count spirals upward, she is implicated in the violence. Soon, she’s convinced that a powerful villain is working in the shadows to cause the carnage and frame her, but the only person who can help her is Dante --- and he hasn’t been seen in over a year and is presumed dead. Colomba is sure he’s alive and out there somewhere, but will she find him before it’s too late?

In Rome, a passenger train speeds into the city’s main station, its first-class car full of dead bodies, the macabre discovery of which falls to Deputy Police Commissioner Colomba Caselli. The police then receive a claim of responsibility and the threat of more murders to come. But neither Caselli nor her eccentrically brilliant ally, Dante Torre, are ready to buy the terrorist link. Dante’s bizarre and traumatic past enables him to see what others miss, and in this case, to connect with a kindred spirit of sorts, a woman named Giltine who also experienced an intense trauma --- one from which she emerged damaged and full of murderous intent.

A woman is beheaded in a park outside Rome, and her six-year-old son goes missing. The chief of Rome’s major crimes unit secretly lures to the case two of Italy’s top analytical minds: Deputy Captain Colomba Caselli, a fierce, warrior-like detective still reeling from having survived a bloody catastrophe, and Dante Torre, a man who spent his childhood trapped inside a concrete silo while being fed by the gloved hand of a masked kidnapper who called himself “the Father.” All evidence suggests that the Father is back and active after being dormant for decades. But when Colomba and Dante begin following the ever-more-bizarre trail of clues, they grasp that what’s really going on is darker than they ever imagined.