A cult detective novel of anarcho-communist-fascist intrigue in late twentieth-century Paris A 78-year-old man is attacked in the basement of an apartment building in the south of Paris, brutally beaten and left for dead. Reading the story in the newspaper the next morning, Gabriel Lecouvreur—AKA private detective Le Poulpe—recognizes the victim's name as that of a once-gifted and controversial author, Andre Sloga, who had slipped into obscurity. Rumor has it that Sloga had become an alcoholic after being dropped by his publishing house. But Lecouvreur discovers that Sloga had in fact been hard at work on an explosive book exposing the scandals of a prominent industrialist and his family. Sloga's research had taken him deep into Paris' political underworld, to the place where communists and anarchists meet fascists. Plenty of characters on any side might have wanted him dead, and Lecouvreur sets himself the task of finding who among them acted on that impulse.