One afternoon after school, nine-year-old Emilie doesn't come home.After a frantic search, her father finds her backpack in a deserted alley.it is the backpack her deceased mother had given her a month before she died.Emilie would never leave that backpack behind voluntarily.A week later, a five-year-old boy goes missing.And then another.Meanwhile, Johanna Vik, a former FBI profiler with a troubled past and a difficult young daughter, is buried in crimes of the past, trying to overturn a decades-old false murder conviction. Police Commissioner Stubo has personal reasons for wanting to solve the case of the missing children: not long ago he lost his wife and only daughter in a terrible accident, and now all he has left is his young grandson. But when he tries to enlist Johanna to help him...