THE ICE WEAVER

A woman arranged under the ice. Red silk thread in her hair. And a detective who realises the killer has been expecting him.

When construction workers break through the Arctic fjord ice near Hammerfest, they find Astrid Solvang - placed, not fallen. Laid on the fjord floor with the care of someone who wanted her to be read rather than simply found. Woven through her hair and around her wrists: red silk thread, arranged in a pattern too precise to be random and too purposeful to be decoration.

Detective Thomas Lund arrives from Oslo with one instruction: no local attachments.

What he finds is a case with the deepest attachment of his life buried at its centre.

His sister Elisa disappeared twenty years ago. The investigation closed quickly. The files were thin. For two decades Lund has been rebuilding what the system refused to hold - and now, in the archive of a sanatorium forty kilometres away, in the maintenance logs of a building officially empty, in the figure-eight of red silk left on his hotel desk by the one man who could have stopped this twenty years ago and chose not to, he begins to understand that Elisa's disappearance was never solved because the person who took her was the same person managing the investigation.

The Ice Weaver is the first Thomas Lund novel: a landmark of Nordic noir that moves from the transparent ice of a Hammerfest fjord through decades of buried institutional silence to a locked room in a closed sanatorium - and to the woman inside it who spent ten years building the evidence that would bring her brother to her door.

Some people are taken. Some people wait. And some people, given nothing but time and intelligence and a notebook, build the case themselves.