In Julia, the region of Italy with one of the highest pro capita incomes in Europe, a maxi-trial is being celebrated: the trial of the gang led by Edmondo Durante, a repeatedly escaped criminal who had constructed a financial empire in the Eighties with the proceeds from hold-ups and off-shore companies. Meanwhile, in the capital the tumultuous passage from the First to the Second Republic is taking place amidst the irrepressible manifestations of Alberico Gentili, Chief of State, the reckless transhumance of men compromised during the old regime and the trials of the «red magistrates», accused of wanting to sweep away an entire political class. Against the background of a disillusioned, shattered and impotent society which more or less knowingly concurs in the unhinging of values, in a world in which Evil creates profits and Good produces none. But it is between the death of Arcangelo Moscato, for decades Director of the Structure, an authentic body separate from the State, and the escape of “Lucifer” Durante, together with another five prisoners in a maximum security prison, that in the most secret rooms of power a game with unpredictable results is played out. A game that involves Services and public prosecutors, secret agents and members of the mafia turned informants manipulated unscrupulously, anti-mafia bodies and corrupt officials. A chess game where lots of pawns are taken and a few too many dead are left on the ground. Because in this reckless, unbridled operation, the stakes are sky high: who will be first to get to the fugitive boss who has been allowed to abscond by someone in high places in exchange for his collaboration? Who will reap, together with revelations, the honours for his false arrest? From the magistrate who put the Magliana Gang on trial, a novel that reads like a thriller, fiction that combines suspense and denunciation that unveils a well known, but still secret, reality. A pitiless conte philosophique in the style of Sciascia on the criminal physiology of the Powers that Be, on the obscurities of Justice and its most current and dramatic drifts, that offers a reading of some mysteries of the last decades of Italian history.