This story opens with a naked woman, dead with the belt of a bathrobe around her neck, but who is not said to have been strangled. It continues with a half-Sicilian, half-Tunisian, half-Croatian suspect, mysterious throughout. It goes into a counter-narcotics operation, which may or may not be related to the crime.

In short: it is a story in which almost nothing is as it seems. There are few certainties, for the punctilious Inspector Giovanni Armani and the sour prosecutor Giacomo Cacciaguerra, who investigate the murder alongside-but would prefer to stay well away from-the disastrous but inexplicably lucky agent Salvo Buonfine.

And to think that Armani, when in the wake of an on-the-job tragedy he had to be transferred from Milan, had thought that the police headquarters in Como, his family's hometown, would be a quiet haven.

Yet perhaps amid the twists and turns of a complicated investigation lies a stroke of lightning.

After the successful Rimini tetralogy starring Costanza Confalonieri Bonnet (who returns in a valuable cameo in this new novel as well), Gino Vignali changes atmospheres and characters but keeps intact the lighthearted tone and brisk pace that distinguish his successful detective stories.

Suspense, eroticism, humor are the winning ingredients of a novel that, skillfully playing with doubts and obsessions, uncertainties and desires, enchants the reader in a reverberation of light and shadow.

Like the water in the lake when it seems calm but is not.