The context

The book recounts the story of Inspector Rogas, who is called upon to investigate the murders of a series of magistrates.
The inspector identifies a lead (a wrongly convicted man exacting revenge), but is diverted by his superiors toward a politically motivated track.
Pursuing this line, he discovers a plot to assassinate an opposition politician in order to thwart a potential alliance between ruling and opposition forces.
Shadowed, a staged crime scene is orchestrated in which the inspector has supposedly killed the opposition leader, only to be slain himself.
A friend of the inspector approaches the new head of the opposition to disclose the truth, but is persuaded to back down for the sake of “social peace”.
Written in 1971, the book bears the heavy imprint of the era of the Historic Compromise and terrorism; it reflects all too heavily the political dilemmas of that historical juncture, rendering the narrative sluggish, prolix, and largely unengaging.
The author’s fundamentally pessimistic outlook regarding any genuine prospect of change in our country is reaffirmed, yet the narrative drive of his other novels is absent, and the underlying irony drowns in tedious philosophizing.