Argentinean writer Ricardo Piglia bases his novel on a 1965 bank robbery in Buenos Aires: the gang, the planning, the robbery itself, and the aftermath. The plot also involves corrupt (and colluding) policemen, the accounts of eyewitnesses, flashbacks to the robbers` often traumatic childhoods, and the bloody end to the story, which finds the gang, holed up in a hotel surrounded by cops, managing one last outrageous act.