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A 78-year-old man is attacked in the basement of an apartment building in the south of Paris, brutally beaten and left for dead. Reading the story in the newspaper the next morning, Gabriel Lecouvreur - AKA Private Detective Le Poulpe - recognises the victim's name as that of a once-gifted and controversial author, Andre Sloga, who had slipped into obscurity. Lecouvreur discovers that Sloga had in fact been hard at work on an explosive book exposing the scandals of a prominent industrialist and his family.