A bestseller in Iceland, and a European publishing phenomenon ...A young man is found brutally murdered, his eyes gouged out. A student of Icelandic history in Reykjavik, he came from a wealthy German family who do not share the police's belief that his drug dealer murdered him. Attorney Thora Gudmundsdottir is commissioned to find out the truth, with the help — and hindrance — of ex-policeman Matthew Reich. Their investigations into his research take them deep into a grisly world of torture and witchcraft, as they draw ever closer to a killer gripped by a dangerous obsession.