Petros Markaris digs around in Greece's recent past – and unearths a lot of dirt. Are yesterday's heroes responsible for today's misery? Forty years after the uprising against the military dictatorship, someone wants to get what the vocal cries of the student movement promised all those years ago: bread, education, freedom. But the path is littered with corpses. Greece has returned to the drachma. Survival is the only priority: jobs are lost, wages unpaid – and a serial killer is targeting prominent leftwingers who shot up the career ladder after rising up against the military junta. Who is behind the killings? A right-wing extremist? Or someone seeking revenge for past transgressions? Inspector Haritos follows the killer's eloquent clues with his own special brand of stubbornness – despite the fact that he has had to make do without his own wages for the last three months.