On the shores of the Rhine, in the Nunnery that houses the Worshippers of the Sacred Bundle, an extravagant, luxurious brothel whose mystical women are devoted to the practice of "forbidden pleasures", the usual hubbub has been replaced by resounding silence. Zelda, one of the oldest and most requested whores, has been flayed alive and her colleagues are terrified. Hers will be the first in a grisly series of murders in which the killer first asphyxiates his victims and then flays the skin off them.

This is also the secret story of Johannes Gutenberg, who locks himself away in a gloomy abbey outside Strasbourg in an effort to find a technique and build a machine that can reproduce books. When he finally manages to print the first copies, rather than achieving fame and glory, he is arrested for selling apocryphal books and accused of being the most audacious forger and cheat the German Holy Roman Empire has ever seen.

Federico Andahazi has written a novel of extraordinary depth that nonetheless offers all the intrigue and suspense of the best thrillers. The impeccable reconstruction of medieval settings transports the reader to several cities in15th Century Europe. This is the fabulous tale of the creation of the printing press, which marked a watershed in the history of humanity, the extremely complex and fascinating character of Gutenerg, and the subsequent trial where it was claimed that books themselves were against nature. It is also the story of the explicit teachings of "the great whore", the mother superior of the Congregation, whose uncanny eroticism transforms the discovery of the secrets of ecstasy into a mystical, sacred and vocational quest. The magnificently portrayed resolution of the murders will change the lives of the sacred brothel and the city forever and end up uniting all the different threads, leading towards the book everyone seeks: The Book of Forbidden Pleasures.