Woman with birthmark

A young woman shivers in the December cold as her mother’s body is laid to rest in a cemetery.

A middle-aged man is killed at his home, shot twice in the chest and twice below the belt. He had recently received a series of bizarre phone calls in which an old song is played down the line, evoking an eerie sense of both familiarity and unease. Before the police can find the culprit, a second man is killed in the same way.

Chief Inspector Van Veeteren and his team must dig far back into each man’s past – but with few clues at each crime scene, can they find the killer before anyone else dies? And as Van Veeteren muses on the complexity of the emerging puzzle, it falls to someone else to provide the first key insight …