The novel recounts a tale of passion, treachery, grief and redeeming love set against the background of the glamorous but deadly world of the Florentine aristocracy. It traces the path of Lord James Markham from the discovery of his wife's depraved infidelities to his tragic affair with a young student while dealing with fraud at the bank and his brother-in-law Paolo's suicide in compromising circumstances. Urged on by his uncle, Cardinal Palmieri, he leaves for Buenos Aires is search of a former mistress, Carolina.
The second half of the novel centers on Carolina, a peronista hotel receptionist whom James had bedded many years earlier. Still in love with him, despite the Malvinas, she agrees to marry him and reluctantly enters into the world of the nobility with all its licentiousness, greed and murder. She struggles to reconcile her roots with her new aristocratic lifestyle. Blessed with a lively intelligence and sturdy common sense, she proves Paolo's suicide to be murder. Arising from obscurity, she emerges as the heroine of this intensely erotic and literary novel.
