ANTOINE JOUIN, who grew up in care, is a young inspector recently transferred to the Paris police headquarters – the Paris Prefecture. His principles and moral integrity border on the naïve, and he leads an uncomplicated life, as if seeking to tick all the right boxes rather than live passionately. However, after finding the dismembered body of a young woman in a suitcase fished out of the river Seine, Jou in finds himself at the heart of a murder investigation involving the country’s top political figures. He is shocked to discover that, when political influence is at stake, the law no longer applies. The investigation also becomes a personal learning process during which he realizes that, to make it at the Prefecture, he’ll have to settle for partial truth and sacrifice his principles.

MARGUERITE “MEG” STEINHEIL was the mistress of the President, who died “in her arms” after receiving sexual favors. Left without a protector and unhappily married to a failed painter, Marguerite has to find a new source of income in order to provide for her daughter. Soon, she becomes an informer to Superintendent Puybaraud, who tasks her with infiltrating the family of Jules Guerin – a leading figure in the nationalist leagues and the editor of a newspaper brazenly named L’Antijuif (“The Anti-Jew”). At the risk of putting herself in danger, Marguerite switches from courtesan to spy.

LOUIS LEPINE is a renowned and respected politician who withdrew from public life in 1899. But with the recent death of the President of the Republic, the upcoming retrial of Dreyfus, and the general atmosphere of unrest, he is recalled to the head of the Prefecture. A political animal with a modern, republican ideal of what the police should be, Lepine is a driven man. He knows the Republic is under threat, and he means to defend it. He has a weak spot – his wife’s addiction to morphine – but Madame Lepine will also be his trump card in his struggle against Superintendent Puybaraud at the Prefecture.

Superintendent Puybaraud has a henchman in Inspector JOSEPH FIERSI, who implements his spymaster’s crooked schemes and strategies. A natural-born thug with a violent disposition, Fiersi seems lo have lost all sense of justice since becoming part of a corrupt system he knows inside-out. The only peace Joseph finds is with his children and his wife, who knows his guilty secret: there’s a good side to him as well.

The name of PUYBARAUD, head of the Paris criminal investigation department, has become a byword for repression and roundups of political opponents. To all intents and purposes, he’s a criminal, with his own network of informers, and he’ll do anything to achieve his goal: take Lepine’s place.

JEANNE CHAUVIN is the daughter of a notary who died when she was only 16. A lop student, she was the first woman in France lo present herself to be sworn in as a lawyer at the Paris Court of Appeal – only lo be turned down on the grounds that the law doesn’t allow women to practice this quintessentially male profession. She is working as an assistant to Maitre Weidmann when she meets Inspector Jouin and agrees to help him with his investigation.