Land of Black Clay takes place largely in the rural township of Sape, a town in the northeast Brazilian state of Paraiba, many hundreds of miles north-northeast of Rio de Janeiro. The main character, Jorge Elias, is a newspaper reporter from Rio de Janeiro who is assigned to cover a news story in Sape. A judge, Odilon Fernandes, has reopened the case of a farmworker union organizer whose murder local landowners ordered.