Investigating a few lost trinkets, Urbino Macintyre discovers a mysterious murder.

Samuel Possle is Venice's oldest expatriate, a reclusive former playboy whose hedonistic youth would make the perfect subject for a book-that is if any writer could make him talk.

Biographer and amateur sleuth Urbino Macintyre has been trying for months to get an interview with Possle, and he is about to give up when his closest friend, the contessa da Capo-Zendrini, offers to introduce him to Possle in exchange for a favor. Worthless items have gone missing from her home, and she wants Macintyre to find out if they were stolen or if her mind is beginning to slip. What appears to be an innocuous case will lead Macintyre down a treacherous canal.

Interviewing Possle and searching for the contessa's missing baubles draws the detective into the city's gothic underbelly, where dark figures seem to lurk around every corner, and the fog conceals terrible secrets.