The body of a young Yemeni woman is discovered in the attic of a Bethlehem Road house, in a Jerusalem neighborhood famous for its impenetrability to outsiders. The victim, once a beauty, is no longer lovely -- her face has been brutally smashed.

More than the usual horror greets Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon in the closed and inscrutable Baka, for an old love and an unfinished romance await him there as well. But much more is concealed beneath the surface of this gruesome homicide -- as tensions between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, hostility between Arabs and Jews, the half-century-old business of kidnapped Yemenite children, and the al Aqsa Intifada of 2000 add fuel to a terrible fire that might never be contained.