When the young teacher Elena takes a position in a Sicilian mountain village, she becomes a respected figure overnight. Anyone who insults her is found dead on the piazza the next morning. An inscrutable, inexplicable web has been spun around her. She is under the protection of "honorable" people and does not know why. The village turns into her nightmare. A crime novel without a perpetrator, without reassuring explanations for the murders, without visible motives. A key to the absurd law of silence.