The Iron Cross

Two teenagers, wanting to sneak a look at a collection of Second World War relics, break into the home of an eccentric historian and find him murdered. Who interfered with the old man in quiet Swedish town of Tanumshöde—an old man who devoted his life to exposing Nazi criminals? That question interests the police, but even more it interests the writer Erica Falck, because it was precisely from the late historian that she tried to learn how among the things left to her in inheritance there ended up a Third Reich award—an Iron Cross—and why her mother kept a bloodstained child’s shirt for life. The former friend of Erica’s mother—now a mentally ill old woman—can’t help her, only mumbling something about old bones that should lie peacefully… But within two months, the sudden deaths take other witnesses from the mother’s younger years.