"Why me?" asks Pepe Carvalho. "Because you're an ex-communist. Because you know who we are, what we're like, where we come from, and where we're going." At a meeting of the central committee of Spain's Communist Party, in a room both locked and guarded, general secretary Fernando Garrido is stabbed to death. But the Party refuses to believe it was an inside job. They turn to former member Pepe Carvalho, once a prisoner of Franco and now, he says well out of politics. Displaced from Barcelona to hectic, unfamiliar Madrid, Carvalho is soon out of his depth. When not pursuing the city's culinary and carnal temptations, or indulging his taste for book-burning, he winds a perilous path through post-Facist Spanish power struggles and politics.