When Mats Sverin, the financial director of a large social project initiated by the Fjelbakka commune, was found shot in the back of the head, the detective Patrick Hedström faced several difficult questions.
First, what was Mats like? Almost every local resident spoke of him extremely positively—yet they knew nothing about him. So Sverin must have had something to hide. Second, was the murder connected to Mats’s work—or were personal motives involved? The second option is entirely possible, because Patrick learned that Mats’s old love had returned to these parts quite recently. On the very day he died, that man had been sailing by boat to visit her—the old house on an island with a disused lighthouse. And then Erika, Hedström’s wife, remembered that this island is considered by people to be a terrible place—a haunt for ghosts…