The narrator, Ana Roiz, the daughter of a well-known journalist in the city of Recife in northeastern Brazil, accepts from among other choices a final internship, required to complete her degree in psychoanalysis from the state university, in the impoverished hamlet of Guararapes located in a scruffy pocket in the seaside hills nearby. Arriving, she experiences initial rejection from the sad-sack residents. Then she receives as a gift from the like-minded slightly older woman, who is the owner of a local cantina, a crystal ball given her by a traveling peddler. Anas new subjects/clients line up for a chance to gaze into it in fascination, and astounded, she proceeds to record a long series of their past-life regressions that emerge coming from leading people active in the area during the era of the spontaneous colonial wars to expel the Dutch occupation in the 1640s. Assembling the pieces of information thus gained, while simultaneously attempting to deal with a serious crisis in her own life and that of her traditional family back in Recife, she and Marina, the cantina owner, grapple with a three-and-a-half-century-old mystery of successive murders, managing to save the miniscule town from dispossession and obliteration by developers of a planned gigantic seaside resortsort of.
