Some towns are built on lies. The dead boy was only the beginning.
Police detective Nelly Birkebæk and her teenage son, Matthias, leave Aarhus in search of a new—and hopefully quieter—life in the provincial town of Hedeborg in central Jutland. Nelly has purchased a run-down house in one of Hedeborg’s nicer neighborhoods, where her neighbor, the friendly—and a little too curious—Ejnar Skjold, quickly takes an interest in her.
But there’s no time to settle in. A missing teenage boy is found dead in a creek in a wooded area just outside town, and it soon becomes clear that the person who called it in was not the first to discover the body.
Hedeborg is a town with many layers. The local eccentric, Randi Bruun, keeps talking about a drone circling over her house. The powerful Eskelund family, who live near the forest, pull more strings than anyone dares admit. And then there are those who live out in the Village—those nobody really talks about.
The investigation takes Nelly Birkebæk and her trusted colleagues at the Hedeborg Police Department from quiet residential neighborhoods to the fringes of society, deep into the town’s most influential families, and out into the abandoned brown coal fields.
