When Flip Lochner, a seedy, tired journalist running from a failed marriage, sees a beautiful woman with four breasts by the lake in Devil's Valley, he thinks it is a mirage. He waits, but then a man called Lukas Death stands before him. So begins Lochner's search for "the truth" first hinted at by Little-Lukas, a young student in Capetown who was mysteriously killed.

Lochner meets Lukas Death's solitary clan, where righteousness prevails by day and depravity by night, where punishment for misdemeanors is summary, yet brutal murderers walk unscathed. Secrecy abounds. Everyone has a story and yet no one tells the story, the story of Little-Lukas and Emma, the woman with the four breasts - the uneasy reminder to the community of the original sin at the root of their history, a secret hidden collectively by the valley people.