Hoping to put behind him tragedy in his professional life and to resolve the turmoil in his personal life, Reykjavík police officer Guðgeir Fransson has moved as far away from home as he can, marking time in a dead-end job in a small town in coastal eastern Iceland.

His detective’s instincts are triggered when he hears about a foreign woman who arrived in this tight-knit community – vanishing as suddenly and as silently as she had appeared.

The trail of the missing woman takes him back to Reykjavík, and then to a remote farmhouse beneath dark mountains where an elderly woman and her son live with the secrets of a sinister past.