When a friend from long ago asks you a favour, you can’t hold back. And neither can Margot Amati, a successful mystery writer, when her ex-companion from private school, Maria Beatrice Tornero d’Albrizzi begs her to help her solve the mysterious disappearance of her step-brother James who vanished twenty years ago. She has never stopped waiting for him. It’s true she’s not a detective, but Margot, even if it is through the characters in her books, is used to investigate. And the Tornero d’Albrizzi family really seems like something out of a novel: vineyards with an terribly antique lineage, a dream villa immersed in the fertile woods of Alta Langa, and they are rich, immensely rich. But perhaps nothing is as it seems. Margot digs around, hypothesizes, needs to learn to move in a formally irreproachable but, in reality, pitiless environment. She runs up against the hostility of the family matriarch, grandmother Maria Laura Tornero, who does not want to open old wounds and especially wants at any cost to keep secrets secret. Not exactly happy marriages, illegitimate children, an economic empire flourishing only on the surface. Yes, because it seems that young James, before disappearing from the face of the earth, took a huge slice of the family fortune for himself which set off an inexorable decline of the family. A decline that the world must never suspect. In her search for the truth, which becomes increasingly similar to an obsession, Margot goes from the orderly and perfect vineyards of the Langhe, from whence comes the finest wine in the world, to an esoteric Turin. She will risk her life more than once but will also find an unexpected and overwhelming love. Just as in one of her novels.