Italy in 1478: during Easter Mass in Florence Cathedral, the younger brother Giuliano is killed in an assassination attempt on the Medici. His brother Lorenzo, who has been quarrelling with the Pope for some time over the supremacy of several Italian republics, survives and opens a merciless hunt for the presumed culprits: the rival clan of the Pazzi, also an old Florentine family. At the same time, the young Jana Dlugosz is suspected of having collaborated with the Pazzis. All the evidence speaks against her, and even her companion, the merchant Peter Bernward, begins to doubt her. Did hunger for power and ambition drive the young woman into a fatal trap?But then people from Jana's circle begin to disappear, and Peter Bernward realises that the case is more complicated than he thought...