It all began when residents of Dunker, a town somewhere on a Scandinavian island, held an Oyster Festival. After a loud and fun celebration, police inspector Karen Eiken Hornby wakes up in a hotel room in the same bed with her boss, Jonas Smeed. By some miracle, she manages to escape while he’s asleep—hoping the man won’t remember how he ended up in the room and with whom.
And it might have gone perfectly—if the next day it hadn’t turned out that Jonas Smeed’s ex-wife was murdered. Hornby is assigned to investigate the tragedy. Now she has to prove that Smeed has an alibi—but do it in such a way that no one guesses her direct involvement in creating that alibi. And while the investigation’s threads lead Karen farther and farther into the past—into the past she desperately tried to forget…