It is a cold, dark, windy night in Oslo, and Igi Heitmann is in her dead father's office, trying to piece together the last days of his life as a private eye. She discovers a butterfly pendant in his desk -- which in turn leads to the discovery of a young woman tying dead in a snowdrift with two bullets in her head and a gun in her hand. Igi learns that her father and the girl died within hours of each other. Who killed the girl, and did the same person kill Andreas Heitmann?Igi is an underemployed research psychologist with enough problems of her own: her husband is a transvestite who often wakes up beside young men instead of next to her. But soon she loses herself in the role of detective, on a trail that leads not only to her father's and the girl's final days, but also to the city's underworld of corruption, sadism, and child abuse. Igi is caught among the shards of a dozen shattered lives and must decide if the patterns of violence she confronts have come about through accident, fate,or sinister human design. She must tread carefully if she is to reconstruct the violent and tragic truth of those lives -- and not be killed herself in the process.