In the small and economically depressed provincial town of Gullspång, tucked away in the deep forests in the middle of Sweden, a seventeen-year-old teenager has disappeared. Annabelle was last seen at a drug and sex fuelled party she attended without her parents' consent. Her mother is frantic with worry, her father is trying to keep his wife from losing her mind, and the efforts of the local police force to find Annabelle are going nowhere. Enter Detective Inspector Charlie Lager, a wilful rising star within the National Operations Department, who is dispatched to Gullspång. What neither her colleagues nor her superiors know is that Charlie grew up in that very town and carries more than one dark secret about her earlier life around with her. As Charlie tries to find out what happened to Annabelle, her own past is coming back to haunt her - and turns out to be intimately linked to the teenager's disappearance...