A professional detective and a doctor investigate a pre-war murder and, in the end, name the identity of the criminal. The reader might expect an exciting yet entirely traditional detective story, but the time and place of the events give the narrative an unusual, tragic tone: the novel’s events take place in the midst of the Nazi “Final Solution” to the Jewish question, and all the characters—detectives, witnesses, the murderer—are residents of a Jewish ghetto, who will have to share the same fate.