"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster". Chief Inspector Miky Miko is a solitary police operative who skilfully moves at the edge of legality in the wild eastern Slovak underworld of the 1990s. Local mafia gangs protected by the national secret service, businessmen who obediently pay the gangs their tributes, and the local police force which is generously rewarded for looking the other way when crimes are committed by "our" people, co-exist here in a fragile symbiosis. Miky has learned not to trust anyone. But when he is assigned a young and inexperienced colleague, they dare to bring down the mafia leader, who is protected from the highest levels of the state machinery. Losing means death but, as Miky finds out, victory also comes at a high price.