A masterwork of suspense and surprise from the author of Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone, Shutter Island carries the listener into a nightmare world of madness, mind control, and CIA Cold War paranoia and is unlike anything you’ve ever heard before.

When a young woman is found brutally murdered in her own apartment with an intricate pattern of lines carved into her face, Copenhagen police detectives Jeppe Korner and Anette Werner are assigned to the case. Soon, they establish a link between the victim, Julie Stender, and her landlady, Esther de Laurenti, who’s a bit too fond of drink and the host of raucous dinner parties with her artist friends. Esther also turns out to be a budding novelist - and when Julie turns up as a murder victim in the unfinished mystery she’s writing, the link between fiction and real life grows.

In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessey is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the projects of “Southie,” the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to tradition and stands proudly apart. One night Mary Pat’s teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances. Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched.

When Elizabeth Keane returns to Ireland after her mother’s death, she’s focused only on saying goodbye to that dark and dismal part of her life. Her childhood home is packed solid with useless junk, her mother’s presence already fading. But within this mess, she discovers a small stash of letters — and ultimately, the truth. Forty years earlier, a young woman stumbles from a remote stone house, the night quiet except for the constant wind that encircles her as she hurries deeper into the darkness away from the cliffs and the sea.

Felix Pink is retired. Widowed for more than a decade and a painfully literal thinker, he has led a life of routine. He occupies himself volunteering as an Exiteer - someone who sits with terminally ill people as they die by suicide, assisting with logistics and lending moral support. When Felix lets himself into Number 3 Black Lane, he’s there to keep a dying man company as he takes his final breath. But just 15 minutes later, Felix is on the run from the police. Now he must discover whether what went wrong was a simple mistake - or deliberate, a murder.