During a debate in Naples' town hall during the early 80s Pasquale Picone, a former Italsider (Italy's then state-owned steel company) worker who had recently lost his job pulls out a jerrycan of gasoline and sets himself alight in front of the Municipal Council, his wife and her three kids are unable to find out where he has been taken after an ambulance arrives with unusual haste and disappears with him on board. Desperate for news about her husband, the woman hires an unlikely kind of 'private eye' (Giancarlo Giannini), in the form of Salvatore Cannavacciuolo, a man who ekes out a living giving informations to people visiting the morgue for one thousand lire apiece. During his investigations Salvatore (who had his less than noble motivations to accept the task) finds out that Pasquale never worked for Italsider, he merely pretended to so; that way he could hide from his own family the fact that he was involved into a veritable web of deals ranging from contraband, to gambling and to outright criminal enterprises linked to the 'Camorra' (the Neapolitan version of the Mob) and its underground. Hoping to profit from this knowledge Salvatore delves deeper and deeper into Picone's secret life with results ranging from the farcical to the dangerous in a movie which can be seen as one of the very last examples of the Commedia all'Italiana genre (here hybridized with the detective story).