Wexford had every reason to remember the Painter case - it was the first murder he'd ever handled on his own. There had been no doubts about the case, until now. Someone wants the case reopened, and they want Wexford proved wrong.

Three very different women come together at isolated Baikie’s Cottage on the North Pennines to complete an environmental survey. Rachael, the team leader, is still reeling after a double betrayal by her lover and boss, Peter Kemp. Anne, a botanist, sees the survey as a chance to indulge in a little deception of her own. And then there is Grace, a strange, uncommunicative young woman hiding plenty of her own secrets. 

The newspaper refers to her only as Victim 2117 - the 2117th refugee to die in the Mediterranean Sea. But to three people, the victim is so much more, and her death sets off a chain of events that throws Department Q, Copenhagen's cold cases division led by Detective Carl Mørck, into a deeply dangerous - and deeply personal - case: a case that not only reveals dark secrets about the past, but has deadly implications for the future.

At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. 

In Riversend, an isolated rural community afflicted by an endless drought, a young priest does the unthinkable, killing five parishioners before being taken down himself. A year later, accompanied by his own demons from wartime reporting, journalist Martin Scarsden arrives in Riversend. His assignment is to describe how the townspeople are coping. But as Martin meets the locals and hears their version of events, he begins to realize that the accepted wisdom - that the priest was a pedophile whose imminent exposure was the catalyst for the shooting - may be wrong.