David Moerk is a translator leading a solitary existence after the death of his wife under mysterious circumstances. He has just been hired to translate the last, unpublished novel by a well-known writer, Germund Rein. In the meantime, Rein has died and can no longer explain why he demanded that this book not be published in the original language, and above all, while absolute discretion as to the whole matter must be observed. In the wake of the early investigations, circumstantial evidence suggests to one and all that the author killed himself. Yet as he translates this last, enigmatic piece of work, Moerk becomes convinced that Rein was murdered, and by someone in his inner circle. Determined to get to the bottom of his wife’s death and that of the author, Moerk will soon learn that the contents of the book he is translating are about to rewrite the lives of more than one person, startingn with his own.

Håkan Nesser (Kumla, Sweden, 1950) was a high school teacher of literature until he became a full-time writer. In 1993 he debuted with the first novel in a series featuring police inspector Van Veeteren: The Mind’s Eye, set in the fictional city of Maardam, in an unnamed northern European country. That series concluded in 2003 with the novel The G File, and earned Nesser numerous awards, such as the European Crime Fiction Star Award (Ripper Award) and the Glass Key Award. 2006 marked the launch of a second hit series, with the novel The Darkest Day, featuring the Swedish inspector of Italian descent, Gunnar Barbarotti. The five books in this series (the last of which, The Butcheress from Little Burma, came out in 2012), are all set in the imaginary village of Kymlinge in Sweden. Dubbed "the Swedish Camilleri" or alternatively "the darling of Maigret fans", Nesser has much in common with other Scandinavian writers, from the atmosphere, the slow pace of the stories, and the claustrophobic interiors, to characters who seem to be impassive yet are really highly emotional. Nesser’s novels have been translated into over twenty-five languages and have sold over thirteen million copies the world over. Some of them have been turned into TV series or films, as is the case for three of the five stories and novels grouped under the title Intrigo (Death of an Author, Dear Agnes, and Samaria), all directed by Daniel Alfredson in 2018 and 2019 and premiering at Noir in Festival 2019.