Six months after being exiled from his beloved Rome, Deputy Police Chief Rocco Schiavone has settled into a routine in the cold, quiet, chronically backward alpine town of Aosta: an espresso at home, breakfast in the piazza, and a morning joint in his office.
A little self-medication helps Rocco deal with the morons that almost exclusively comprise the local force. Especially on a day like today. It’ s his girlfriend’ s birthday (if you could call her that; in his mind, Rocco’ s only faithful to his late wife), he has no gift— and he’ s about to stumble upon a corpse.
It begins when a maid reports a burglary in Aosta. But there’ s no sign of forced entry, and after Rocco picks the lock, he notices something off about the carefully ransacked rooms. That’ s when he finds the body: a woman, the maid’ s employer, left hanging after a grisly suicide. Rocco’ s intuition tells him the scene has been staged. In other words, it’ s murder— a pain in the ass of the highest order.
