A late summer night in 1990 a young pregnant woman is brutally murdered by being buried in the sand, to slowly become submerged by the tide. 25 years later, the sadistic murder remains unsolved. Olivia Rönning receives the task of studying the case as a cold case exercise at the Police Academy. Olivia becomes almost obsessed with the murder when she discovers that her father previously worked with the investigation. She quickly realizes that she must get a hold of the principal investigator, detective Tom Stilton, but he seems to have disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Vera, a mother of two children, is left by her husband and looses her job all at once. She gets a job offer in another town, grabs her children and their belongings and moves there for a fresh new start in life. Before she gets there she hits a boy with her car. In chock, she assumes the boy to be dead. But is it really Vera who killed him?