An audio book. 2 timelines.
In 1983 Billy Neilson, a little boy disappears. He has an uncle Harold, a good hunter who people fear. Menson is the detective. He's a newcomer to the area and wants his family to be accepted by the locals. Search parties are sent out. Nothing's found.
Many years later, Veronica Lunt, in her thirties, is starting again as a grief consellor after a break of a few months after an incident which nearly cost her job. She's not allowed to contact Leon, her ex (an ex-client). When she was 14 her mother suicided.
The narrative jumps between the 2 timelines. We discover that the counsellor is Billy's sister. She's changed her name. She thinks someone new in her grief group, Isak, was a friend of Billy, or even Billy himself. Someone has been going through her flat. Her brother's a policeman. He looks nothing like his father.
When the locals think that Tommy Roth is guilty, Menson apprehends him, but has to let him go.
Veronica visits Menson, who's no longer a policeman. He regrets not having Ruth found guilty. She talks to her father for the first time in a while. She talks to some old man who now have looser tongues. Following a lead she discovers an old hunting shed. She falls into old mining works and is rather lucky to escape (I wonder whatt that has to do with the plot ...). She feels things in her chest - "the crack in the ice inside her melts", "fires an icicle right into her heart", "cold black water starts to well up through the cracks in her chest". Maybe these phrases sound better in Swedish.
She should know better than to get friendly with clients, but Isak's interesting. He says that when he learned he was adopted he started reading about the Billy case and wondered if he was Billy. Some details rang bells. But when she takes him around he village, noting clicks. Her father doesn't want Isak in the house. He's attacked violently by some of the locals (uncle Harold included) who seem to want him dead. She sleeps with him. He tells her he's been lying, that really he's Tommy Roth's son and wants to discover what happened to him. Isak though that she might be able to help.
She finds love letters between Tommy and her mother. Actually, Billy was Tommy's child. Her depressed mother had tried to kill herself and Billy. Her father had saved her mother but not Billy. Her father had been amazingly forgiving. While she was in a mental home, people killed Tommy, thinking he was the child-killer, thinking her mother would be happy to hear that Tommy was dead. But the news made her kill herself. Vera/Veronika seems to cope with the revelation.
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