About the book: 2004 / Alex Peni wakes up in a squalid room in a cheap New York hotel next to the bloody corpse of a prostitute. An amnesiac alcoholic, Peni has no memory of what happened, except that he took the dead girl to his room the night before. He is confident that he is innocent of murder, but the situation is seriously complicated by the fact that Peni has already been convicted of a similar crime and was only recently released from prison.