Detective Inspector Javier Falc+n is transfixed from the moment he sees the blood-streaked face of murder victim, Raul Jim+nez, in his Seville apartment. When he finds, littered on the bloody shirt front like exotic tropical petals, the man's eyelids, he imagines the relentless, unflagging horror and it becomes the beginning of his own. But as he sifts the evidence and comes across old photographs of the victim's earlier life in Tangier after the war, he finds that he too is dragged back into the past. Falc+n himself had been brought up in Tangier. His father had become famous there. A Spanish artist of world reknown, Fransisco Falc+n, had died recently leaving a large inheritance and a set of journals which his son starts reading. It is from these diaries that the detective discovers that the father he'd always loved was somebody he didn't know. As the murder case unfolds, Falc+n's mind unravels. He is beset with inexplicable anxieties and his brief moments of sleep are wracke