Having left the Faroes when he was three years old, Jan Reyna is now a British murder squad police detective, and the Islands are completely foreign to him. But he is drawn back when his estranged father is found unconscious in an isolated spot, a shotgun by his side and someone else’s blood in his car. Then a man is found washed up on a beach, a shotgun wound in his side, but signs that suffocation were the cause of death.

Is his father – who has suffered a massive stroke and is unable to speak – responsible for the man’s death? What about his half-brothers, and the signs that one of them may have been blackmailed? Jan falls in with local detective Hjalti Hentze, a man after his own heart, but as the stakes get higher and Jan learns more about the truth behind his mother’s flight from the Faroes, he must decide whether to stay and learn more, or forsake the strange, windswept Faroe Islands for good.