When detective Varg Veum takes a telephone call in his office, his mind is suddenly thrust back 25 years, to his days as a child protection officer and the case of a small boy separated from his mother under tragic circumstances. This same boy has surfaced in several other cases, in connection with a sudden death in his new foster home and, a decade later, in a dramatic double murder in Sunnfjord. Now that boy is an adult on the run in Oslo, determined to take revenge on those responsible for destroying his life-among them his former child protection officer, detective Veum.