A narrator with high literary aspirations and a novel in the best tradition of internationally successful crime fiction, even if (or precisely because) its setting is the Austrian province. Chief Inspector Anton ("Tone") Hagen returns home to Vorarlberg after years with the Linz criminal police. One day after his appointment, the widowed writer Eugen Rhomberg is murdered in Feldkirch - to be precise: decapitated, and with an original but sharpened halberd. Next to the body, a manuscript is found that literary anticipates the murder. With a significant deviation in the identity of the victim: In Rhomberg's text, his highly successful colleague and rival Sebastian Steinbacher is killed. By the way, Rhomberg's two daughters, one of whom is married to a second-generation Turk, do not seem to mourn their murdered father particularly deeply.