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Happiness is extinguished completely one cold November night when eleven-year-old Lennard Grabbe fails to return home. Thirty-four days later, he is found to have been murdered, and former inspector Jakob Franck, the protagonist of Friedrich Ani's previous novel The Nameless Day, is entrusted with delivering the most horrible news any parent could ever dream of, setting off a chain reaction of grief among family and friends.

As the special task force is unable to make any progress in the case and the family is unable to deal with the loss, Franck--driven by the need to bring them clarity but also by the painful memories of all the unsolved murder cases from when he was still on active duty--buries himself in witness statements and reports up to the point of exhaustion. He spends hours at the crime scene and employs his special technique of "thought sensitivity," an abstract, intuitive process that may very well lead him to the "fossil"--that crucial piece of information he needs to solve the case.

Once again, Ani combines deep sorrow, human darkness, and breath-taking tension in a novel whose melancholy can hardly be surpassed.