Sara Blædel

Receiving an unexpected inheritance from the father who abandoned her, 40-year-old widow Ilka Nichols Jenson impulsively travels from Copenhagen to her late father's mortuary in Wisconsin and begins to comb through his estate before stumbling on an unsolved murder.

After the discovery of a body in the forest, the new director of the Danish Missing Persons Department recognizes the dead woman as a child inmate at a state mental institution and uncovers links to her own past during the investigation