The High Coast Series

It’s been more than 20 years since Olof Hagström left home. Returning to his family’s house, he knows instantly that something is amiss. The front door key, hidden under a familiar stone, is still there. Inside, there’s a panicked dog, a terrible stench, water pooling on the floor: The father Olaf has not seen or spoken to in decades is dead in the bathroom shower.

Detective Eira Sjödin is just old enough to remember the summer when 16-year-old Lina Stavred went missing. Her entire community was haunted by the disappearance - especially when Olof Hagström, just 14 himself, confessed to her murder. That was two decades ago. No one in their small rural community has seen or heard from him since, but the spectre of his crime lingers in the forests around the town. But now Olof is back, and he stands accused of another brutal crime.

When a dead man is found locked in the basement of an abandoned house, deep in the woods, there is no evidence of what happened beyond his name - scratched into the wall before he died. The regional police can't find anyone who knew him. But no-one knows the locals like Detective Eira Sjöden. When her expert knowledge of her home town is again called in, she knows one of them must have seen something. Before she can uncover the truth, though, someone shockingly close to her disappears.

In the small mining town of Malmberget, north of the Arctic Circle, residents and their houses are being relocated. As the mine that built the town slowly swallows it street by street, building by building, the memories of the community have collapsed into the huge pit they call “the hole.” Only a few stubborn souls cling to their homes, refusing to leave. When two workers making their final preparations hear a sound coming from a basement, they break a cellar window and find a terrified man curled up in a corner.

As the spring warmth melts the ice, divers search the wreckage at the bottom of the Ångermanland River - but the murdered man they recover was put there much more recently than the historic artefacts they were seeking. Local Detective Eira Sjödin, newly pregnant and not talking about it, is proud to be put in charge of the investigation - until she discovers the man's identity, and the evidence begins to point towards her own family.