The story unfolds around presidential elections and Holy Week in the year 2000, which is to say, in a period after the internal confrontations caused by the war against terrorists that took place in Perú in the decades of the eighties and the nineties.
He is organized, precise and pedantic to a “T”, with high regard for proper grammar—in a word, he is "anal"; he is intellectual and even ingenuous, to a certain degree, until he goes about uncovering corruption that exists in different procedures in which he is directly involved: for example, the presidential elections or usurpation of authority.
Upon reading one can find that the novel reviewed touches on topics that positively have occurred and are validated in detailing events of Uchuraccay, the Quechua Indian myth of the Inkarrí as related cogently by Father Quiroz, festivals like the fertility rite and Turu pukllay (indigenous bullfight)[1] (cf., photo [1]), the Holy Week processions, in mentioning the terrorist practice of hanging dogs from street lamps.
Much of the characters’ dialogue is, in effect, quoted from documents from Shining Path or from the statements of terrorists, officials and members of Peruvian armed forces who took part in the conflict.
The novel spins thematic currents by interweaving the writer's creative story telling content of a thriller novel with the context of Andean life and world view, and the elements Pre-Columbian Incan anthropology.
Likewise he held eerie conversations with her in the ancestral estate, perhaps, of her refurbished home, despite her being dead, as a sort of intermediary of the past and the present in a modern form of Incan ancestor worship, an important element in Andean life.
It is through the eyes of Commander Carrión, who bares uncanny witness to an unusual wealth of detail of the protagonist's childhood, that Chacaltana comes to reveal the nature of his early relationship with his father.
He is reminded of the childhood psychological horror in hand-written notes penned in crayon and fractured syntax—in stark contrast to the pedantically precise legal briefs and reports Associate District Prosecutor Félix Chacaltana Saldívar strives to produce—that the killer(s) ostensibly composes after each murder and are strung out over the novel's trajectory, which are accidentally spilled from a briefcase belonging to a prime suspect.