Book description
Thirty nine steps rose from the busy road of Tuborgvej into
Mindelunden, with its quiet graves and abiding bitter memories. Lennart
Brix, head of the Copenhagen homicide team, felt he'd been walking them
most of his life. Beneath the entrance arch, sheltering from the icy
rain, he couldn't help but recall that first visit almost fifty years
before. A five-year-old boy, clutching the hand of his father, barely
able to imagine what he was about see . . . The bark of a dog broke his
reverie. Brix looked at the forensic officers, white bunny suits, mob
hats, marching grim-faced down the rows of graves, towards the space in
the little wood where the rest of the team was gathering . . . Three
gnarled stakes, replicas now, with the originals in the Frihedsmuseet. A
woman was tied to the centre pole, hands behind her back, bound with
heavy rope round her torso. Blonde hair soaked with rain and worse, head
down, chin on chest, crouched awkwardly on her knees. A gaping wound at
her neck like a sick second smile. She wore a blue dressing gown slashed
in places all the way to the waist, flesh and skin visible where the
frenzied blade had stabbed at her. Her face was bruised and dirty. Blood
poured from her nostrils, had dried down each side of her mouth, like
makeup on a tragic clown . . . It is two years since the notorious Nanna
Birk Larsen case. Two years since Detective Sarah Lund left Copenhagen
in disgrace for a remote outpost in northern Denmark. When the body of a
female lawyer is found in macabre circumstances in a military graveyard,
there are elements of the crime scene that take Head of Homicide,
Lennart Brix, back to an occupied wartime Denmark - a time its
countrymen would wish to forget. Brix knows that Lund is the one person
he can rely on to discover the truth. Reluctantly she returns to
Copenhagen and becomes intrigued with the facts surrounding the case. As
more bodies are found, Lund comes to see a pattern and she realises that
the identity of the killer will be known once the truth behind a more
recent wartime mission is finally revealed . . .
