A teenager, a brilliant student of Plato's Academy, is found dead, torn apart, apparently by wolves. However, his teacher, Diagoras, certain of the terror he had seen in the young man's eyes the day before his death, resorts to the services of Hercules Pontoros, Cryptographer of Enigmas. A Platonic philosopher and a devotee of square logic will embark on a search for Truth and the guilty, while the dismembered bodies will multiply in the streets of the former closed city.

This story is preserved in twelve chapters - perhaps as many as the Labors of Hercules - in an ancient papyrus that was accidentally found many centuries later. The distinguished editor died before completing his work, and now the anonymous translator delves deeper and deeper into the text, composing extensive footnotes.

Until one day he discovers that the editor of the manuscript died under the same circumstances as the teenage student of the Platonic Academy...

"The Cave of Ideas" is an unclassified detective novel, a philosophical thriller, a testimony to the triumph of fiction by one of the most original Spanish-speaking writers of our time.