The violent death of a child is always a great tragedy. The small, tightly-knit Danish community of Morslet is horrified when the body of an eight-year-old boy is found in a semi-frozen stream running through the town, strangled with fishing line and showing signs of burns on his body. Deputy Commissioner of the Criminal Police of Aarhus, Daniel Trochich, and his assistants, whom readers already know from the novel "The Collector of Os," begin the investigation by interviewing the parents, teachers, and caregivers of the extended-day school, in an attempt to reconstruct the timeline of events leading up to the crime and to track down the killer. Among the suspects are an obsessed old man with a dark past, as well as a teenager with a guilty conscience. Everything becomes even more complicated when Trochich discovers a connection between the current case and a tragic incident from thirty years ago, when a teenager drowned in the same river. And all of this reveals a story of broken trust, physical and sexual violence, and a legacy passed down to family members who did not know how to escape madness.
