A Price for Everything

"There is a price for everything." Thus begins the second installment of Hammer & Hammer's explosive crime series featuring Copenhagen police investigator Konrad Simonsen -- a sentence that simultaneously strikes the theme of the nerve-racking follow-up to "The Hanging."

Following a sensational opener in which the German chancellor stumbles upon the corpse of a young woman while on a fact-finding trip to Greenland's ice cap, Konrad Simonsen is dispatched to the Arctic to sort things out. The woman, Maryann Nygard, turns out to have been murdered a quarter of a century before, and for Simonsen, the killer's MO brings back memories of a previous case -- memories he'd rather be without. Not only are there remarkable similarities between the two victims and the manner in which they were killed, this new case moreover provides incontestable evidence that Konrad's previous main suspect was innocent. Small comfort in view of the fact that he committed suicide ten years previously, just as he was about to be detained. The realization that he drove an innocent man to his death deals another blow to the hardened policeman's already failing health.

Prompted by the similarities between the two murders, Konrad and his team start probing into other cases in which women of the same age and appearance have been reported missing, only to discover that the case reaches far wider than they had ever imagined.