Hoping to put behind him tragedy in his professional life and to resolve the turmoil in his personal life, Reykjavik police officer Gudgeir Fransson has moved as far away from home as he can. With a temporary job as a security guard in the small town of Hofn in south-eastern Iceland, he becomes increasingly intrigued by conflicting reports of a foreign woman who arrived in the tight-knit community, and unexpectedly disappeared. As his detective's instincts are triggered, he begins his own hunt for the mystery woman nobody seems to have missed. The trail of the missing woman takes him back to Reykjavik, and to a remote farmhouse beneath dark mountains where an elderly woman and herson live with their sinister past.