Where can you find truth in a world that is so thoroughly ruled by lies? That is the question tackled by the investigation of a French journalist who endeavours to shed light on the enigma of an unexplained death: that of the brilliant South American writer Alejandro Bevilacqua, found lying on his balcony floor in Madrid in the mid-1970s. The few accounts of those who knew the deceased - including those of his last lover, a former fellow prison inmate, a sworn enemy and even the author Alberto Manguel himself - are contradictory and unreliable.