It is midsummer in Sweden — when the light lingers through dawn and the long winter comes to an end. Now, in this magical time, a brutal killer has chosen to strike, and the murder of a female priest sends shockwaves through the community. It has been almost two years since attorney Rebecka Martinsson returned to her birthplace, Kiruna, in order to stop an eerily similar murder spree. Now she is back in Kiruna, where a determined policewoman works on the case and the people who loved or loathed the victim mourn or revel in her demise. As Rebecka is drawn into a mystery that soon will claim another victim, the dead woman's world consumes her: a world of hurt and healing, sin and sexuality, and above all, of lethal sacrifice.

There is a church in the glittering frozen wastes of Northern Sweden. Inside, a sacrifice: the body of a man — slashed to pieces, hands severed, eyes gouged out. The victim's sister, Sanna, is first to discover the body and immediately finds herself the police's only suspect. Terrified and confused, she calls on a friend: hot-shot city lawyer Rebecka Martinsson. Rebecka hardly wants to return to Kirana — the small town she fled in disgrace years ago. But Sanna is frightened and she needs a loyal friend to clear her name. Someone not scared to dig deep and find the true killer. Yet Rebecka is not especially welcomed into the closed-lipped community of Kirana. She might know the town, the people and how suspicious they can be of strangers. But she has still to find out how dark the town's secrets have become in her absence.

Innocence will be sacrificed... On the floor of a church in northern Sweden, the body of a man lies ritually mutilated and defiled — and in the night sky, the aurora borealis dances as the snow begins to fall. Rebecka Martinsson is heading home to Kiruna, the small town she'd left in disgrace years before. A Stockholm tax lawyer, Rebecka has a good reason to return: her friend Sanna, whose brother has been horrifically murdered in the church of the cult he helped create. Beautiful and fragile, Sanna needs someone like Rebecka to remove the shadow of guilt that is engulfing her, to forestall an ambitious prosecutor, and to confront the rumours circulating in a closed and frightened community. But to help her friend, and to find the real killer of a man she once adored and is now not sure she ever knew, Rebecka must relive the darkness she left behind in Kiruna, delve into a sordid conspiracy of deceit, and confront a killer whose motives are dark and impossible to guess...