An exhibition at The Herring House art gallery is disturbed by a distraught stranger who claims to be an amnesiac unaware of his true identity, a situation complicated for Inspector Perez when the man turns up murdered the next day.

Tora Hamilton is an outsider at her new home on the rocky, wind-swept Shetland Islands, a hundred miles from the northeastern tip of Scotland. Though her husband grew up here, it's the first time he's been back in twenty years. Digging in the peat on their new property, Tora unearths a human body, at first glance a centuries-old bog body, interesting but not uncommon. But realizing that the body is in fact much newer, that the woman's heart has been...