It is in the late 1930s, and Cesare Pavese, a writer, with two of his friends meets a very uninhibited noble couple.

June 27, 1980: a DC–9 flying over the Tyrrhenian Sea breaks up mid-air and crashes near the Italian island of Ustica, killing all 81 people on board. The official version blames the "structural failure" of the plane, but a young journalist smells a cover-up and starts to uncover the truth out of the 'invisible wall' of lies built by politicians and air force higher-ups.

Mr. Rorret is the owner of a cinema called "The Peeping Tom" which shows a constant stream of horror films. Rorret dates women from the audience and then kills them, taking sadistic pleasure from their expressions of terror. This film is apparently a well-filmed homage to "Peeping Tom", with nods to "Psycho" and "Strangers on a Train".

Molinat is assigned to the case of a man found with a bullet in his ear on the shore of a little Atlantic coast resort he knows well. Indeed, he used to live there before his wife disappeared at sea, never to be found again. As the ocean rejects a new corpse everyday, the mystery thickens and the list of potential suspects grows longer. This slows Molinat's progress as much as the cumbersome Leroyer, sent in to spy on him and hopefully impede his progress. The tension mounts and the ring involving the three young ladies in the grey mansion, the village idiot and the real estate agent starts spinning out of control.