The village-like neighborhood of Passy, home to many of Paris’s wealthiest residents, is the last place one would expect a murder. But when Aim e Leduc’s godfather, Morbier, a police commissaire, asks her to check on his girlfriend at her home there, that’s exactly what Aim e finds. Xavierre, a haut bourgeois matron of Basque origin, is strangled in her garden while Aim e waits inside. Circumstantial evidence makes Morbier the prime suspect, and to vindicate him, Aim e must identify the real killer. Her investigation leads her to police corruption; the radical Basque terrorist group, ETA; and a kidnapped Spanish princess.