Palomino Molero, a young man known for singing beautifully to his own guitar accompaniment, is found dead, savagely tortured and murdered.  Silva, lieutenant of the Guardia Civil - the story plays in Peru in 1957 - investigates, assisted by his sergeant Lituma, the murder of the young soldier.  Their inquiries lead them to the nearby airforce-base, where colonel Mindreau cooly lets them know that the inquiries conducted by the army had already concluded that nobody of the army was involved.  Silva and Lituma hadn't expected anything else.

But they don't give up and find out more and more about what seemed a clear cut case in the beginning, and narrow in on the truth.  The village in the mean time is buzzing with all sorts of rumors about the youg Molero being involved in smuggling or him voluntarily joining the army to avoid the jealous husband of his lover.  And more and more the village is convinced that the Big Fish are involved, and that the Big Fish will escape, as usual.

What starts like a whodunnit set in Latin America gradually transforms into an indictment of the inarticulate classification of everyone and everything in the Peruvian society of the fifties.  The army is superior, full stop. The army is always right, no matter what the Guardia finds out.  And more and more the sense of superiority of a white father who takes very drastic measures when his daughter falls for a cholo, a "half-breed" puts its mark on the developments.  After all, in his mind it is simply unthinkable that a decent white girl could fall for "one of those".

It's a relatively short story -my translation had only 140 pages with average-size fonts- yet there are a lot of stories woven into that one.  The whodunnit.  The whydunnit.  Lieutenant Silva's fantasies about the married innkeeper, and her reaction to it.  Even a bitter love-story.  And a rather surprising ending.