It is 1946. The young Carabinieri (Editor’s note: an Italian military police with state police duties) staff sergeant Gatta is sent to the barracks of a town on the Neapolitan coast. War seems to have marginally disturbed the small community. Nonetheless the Carabinere is suspicious: a mystery rests on the town; a number of unexplainable deaths have occurred in a hotel, accidents – people say, a chain of murders covered up too quickly, at the time, by authorities. Led by a romantic and inalienable sense of justice, Gatta begins investigating, his methods resembling a psychoanalytic path, in Dante’s circles of hell. Gatta compares and puts together elements which seem heterogeneous and separate. Slowly, fragments come together and characters and evidence speak out: the murderers and the victims chase and talk to each other from different time layers: the hotel owner, a mother unable to cope with her sorrow, a coward son and a resigned sister, an orphan who comes back and two young women ferociously murdered… Determined and persistent, the staff sergeant puts the pieces together, gives sense to a human story, but is eventually defeated: the grief, the shame and the indifference of evil win over the truth.