This French thriller begins with a flashback to a small village dance where a six-year-old girl is kidnapped and killed. Seventeen years later the murder remains unsolved. The girl's parents Caroline and Chris have gone on with separate lives Caroline remarried and had another daughter while Chris became an alcoholic. The two are thrown back together when each begin receiving strange messages that imply their daughter has returned from the dead for vengeance. They contact a police detective (the lover of Caroline's best friend) who finds the case intriguing and decides to reopen it. Unfortunately, as soon as he begins questioning the old suspects, people begin to die.

Part-time model Valentine unexpectedly befriends a retired judge after she runs over his dog. At first, the grumpy man shows no concern about the dog, and Valentine decides to keep it. But the two form a bond when she returns to his house and catches him listening to his neighbors’ phone calls.

Henry Dunant, son of a Geneva francophone upper class bourgeoisie family, works for a Swiss exploitation company in French Algeria; when the colonists are thirsty, he returns determined to convince the firm and emperor Napoleon III to build a dam for them. After his Uncle, Dr. Hubert Dunant, diagnoses him not with Algerian typhus, just malaria, also his first meeting -dropping drawers in hospital for a shot- with nurse Cécile Thuillier, and meeting his careerist brother Daniel's fiancée, Léonie Bourg-Thibourg, daughter of the firm's boss, the board approves his plan. On his way to the emperor, who didn't even concede to receive him, Henry gets stuck in Castiglione, part of the Austrian province Lombardy which French troops came to 'liberate'; his Geneva friend Dr. Louis Appia saves his life by presenting him to suspicious Austrian troops as his medical assistant...

In 1914, a cruise ship sets sail from Naples to spread the ashes of beloved opera singer Edmea Tetua near Erimo, the isle of her birth. During the voyage, the eclectic array of passengers discovers a group of Serbian refugees aboard the vessel. Peace and camaraderie abound until the ship is descended upon by an Austrian flagship. The Serbians are forced to board it, but naturally they resist, igniting a skirmish that ends in destruction.

Palermo is home to a gigantic theater building: the Teatro Massimo - the largest theater in the world. The writer Isidor Gondlowitz sets off from his home country, Switzerland, to write a book about this impressive place. Although the theater is intact and playable, it is not being used. Gondlowitz tries out all the roles on and behind the stage and begins to lose himself more and more in the huge building and in acting.