The battle drum

When a professor stumbles upon a man's corpse in a dark alley, she finds a stark warning on the brick wall beside the body, scrawled in coral nail polish: 'Beware of me, my love, beware of the silent woman in the desert'. After reporting the crime to the police, the professor becomes the lead informant of the case, led by a detective with a newfound obsession with poetry and a long list of failures on her back. But what has the professor really seen? While more bodies of men are found across the city, the detective tries to decipher the meaning of the poems, and the darker stream of violence spreading throughout the city.