Police Inspector Odd Singsaker has been captured, imprisoned on an island off the Northern coast of Norway. He wakes to find himself holding a shotgun. Next to him is a corpse. But what events led him to this point? And how did he get here? A few weeks earlier, his wife, Felicia, disappeared. Though he didn’t know it, she was trying to find her way back to Odd to reconcile, but then she vanished into a snowstorm. Possibly involved is a corrupt, coldblooded cop from Oslo, a devious college student who’s stolen a great deal of cocaine from drug dealers, and a hit man hired by the drug dealers who have been robbed. All of these lives intersect with Odd’s as he searches for Felicia.

A promising young singer is found dead in a clearing in a forest. She has been gruesomely murdered --- her larynx was cut out, and an antique music box was placed carefully atop her body, playing a mysterious lullaby that sounds familiar but no one can quite place it. Chief Inspector Odd Singsaker of the Trondheim Police Department, who is still recovering from brain surgery, is called in to investigate.

A murder at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, bears a close resemblance to one in Trondheim, Norway. Richmond homicide detective Felicia Stone and Trondheim police inspector Odd Singsaker find themselves working on similar murder cases, committed the same way, but half a world away. And both murders are somehow connected to a 16th-century palimpsest book that appears to be a journal of a serial murderer back in 1529 Norway, a book bound in human skin.