Henry is a fifty-year-old teacher at loose ends since his wife left him, so he spends his holiday in K., at the country house of a high school buddy, Urban, an aspiring writer. As the two reminisce about the good old days, an old story reemerges about the class beauty Vera Kall, whom everyone was secretly in love with, until she mysteriously disappeared at their graduation party. Vera was the daughter of a very strict minister and grew up in a house in the forest. She had vanished that night without a trace, but the last one to see her was Henry himself, and they had even made love, something he never told anyone. Now that Henry goes back to the scene of her disappearance, he receives a note in Vera Kall’s hand which says "High time you came back". Henry and Urban are stunned by Vera’s suddenly resurfacing after thirty years, and in fact she hasn’t: an investigation reveals that the letter was written by a cousin of Vera’s, Eva, convinced, and she’s not alone, that Henry had something to do with Vera’s vanishing into thin air. The finale will be even more shocking.

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.