Literary fiction

A Nordic-type crime story from North Bohemia

Václav Rákos, a criminal investigator from Ústí, heads to the hospital in Rumburk suspecting that a recently deceased patient was a victim of murder, not methanol poisoning. Rákos is convinced of a connection between the woman’s death and the case of a nurse charged with poisoning six patients with potassium.

Not long afterwards, an employee of the national park at nearby Doubice is murdered. The evidence points at Miloš Bjelej, a convicted criminal from the Yugoslav Wars, who was once a military advisor in Pardubice. The thing is, Bjelej has been officially dead for ten years.

In this uncommonly long, heavy winter, Václav Rákos discovers that the murders in Rumburk and thereabouts have come from a place much darker than the one he was suspecting.