Amaia gives birth to a son, which is a surprise, as she had been told that she was expecting a girl. The name she chooses for her son is Ibai.
In this book Amaia is involved in two cases. Before the birth of her son, the suicide of Jasón Medina has aroused her interest when the man had left a note for her with a simple word, Tarttalo, who is the name of a mythological creature in the Basque mythology. Amaia discovers that there is another suicide, who had also killed his wife, and hanged himself in prison. He had carved teh word Tarttalo into the wall of the prison. Another common feature is that these both murderers have killed their victims in a clumsy, barbarous way, but both women presented an amputation that had been carried out in a most careful way. The limb was not found.
Amaia is called by Judge Markina, telling her that a convicted criminal, Ramón Quiralte wants to talk to her. This man was found guilty of murdering his wife, Lucía Aguirre, but her body was never found. Yet, Quiralte confessed to the crime, believing that if there was no body, he would not be sent to prison. Now Quiralte tells Amaia that he wants to tell her where the body is. He has the coordinates for the position of the body, which is in a field full of oloe trees. The police find the body, and when Amaia has a look at the body, she realises that there is a limb missing, and she is certain that Quiralte will commit suicide. They rush to prison, but they are too late. Quiralte has ingested rat poison and has died, and she find the word Tarttalo, painted on the wall of the prison cell.
Another case that Amaia is assigned is connected with the church in a village called Azikkun. She is told that the church has been desecrated several times. The first time a baptismal font was destroyed, the second time a pew in the first row was reduced to slivers, and this time the cloths covering the altar have been burnt. What they also find among the ashes is the small bones of a child's arm. Amaia thinks that this is the doing of some hooligans, but her boss thinks different, and so does Father Sarasola who is a big fish in the Vatican and wants her to investigate the case. It seems that they think that this is connected to the agotes, a group of pariahs that in the Middle Ages were segregated from society.
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