The mayor of a small provincial town, caught up in mundane affairs and corruption, summons his three deputies before fleeing: one of them will have to succeed. From then on, Veyron, Ben and Karabik, mere office colleagues, become fierce rivals with betrayals, inventions, revelations.
A cottage inhabited by a peasant, crazy painter in his spare time, who only paints naked women. After his death, another farmer decides to transform the place into a brothel which quickly attracts the notables of the area. But all those who come disappear one by one.
The old Mr. Esbirol, a passionate bookseller of crime fiction, had waited for a long time that the three conditions necessary for committing a perfect crime materialize : murder, preferably by strangulation of an anonymous bystander walking in a deserted street.
Prosecutor Vadim, who has an uneasy relationship with his glamorous wife Chanéac, vanishes at the time a psycho is offing club girls to the strains of the "Tu es si jolie ce soir" song.