The land of black clay is a region of northeast Brazil, the "Jungle Zone" where the sugar cane is stunted but profitable and where the local plantation oligarchs have been suppressing peasant activism and labor unionization for decades. A newly appointed judge, Odilion Fernandes, has reopened the 1962 murder case of João Pedro Teixeira, a (real-life) black farm-labor organizer. Rio de Janeiro newspaper reporter Jorge Elias covers the investigation; through Elias's findings, Louzeiro reveals the depths of corruption that stem from the landowners' cabal and their hit squad, the Syndicate of Death. Louzeiro (Childhood of the Dead), a former journalist as well as a screenwriter (Pixote), give a full account of the thugs' intimidation tactics—rape, disappearances and a gruesome local specialty, the cabrocó, in which the victim is crippled by repeated soaking of hot and cold water from the sugar mill's washing tank. Set in the early 1980's, this is an old-school muckraking novel with a firm political message and shocking revelations. Unfortunately it also harbors a tendency to rely on speechifying and exposition rather than plot and character. In addition, the novel is weighed down by its large group of characters and the author's apparent aim to portray an entire socioeconomic region. A peasant as sacrificial lamb, a tacked-on love affair between Elias and a woman searching for a missing relative, and other earnestly felt cliches slow even further the pace of this aspiring political thriller.