Child of the Shadows

The war ended seventy years ago. The vengeance is only just beginning. In the quiet harbor of Ronehamn, a ninety-year-old man is found with a bullet in his chest. Heinz Meyer was a pillar of the community, but he carried a secret that dated back to the darkest days of 1945. He was one of the German soldiers who arrived on Gotland alongside five hundred emaciated survivors of the concentration camps-a ghost army of victims and victimizers housed under the same roof at the Lärbro war hospital. Decades later, the silence of the hospital wards has been broken by gunfire. As Detective Inspector Maria Wern takes the case, she finds herself caught between a haunting past and a chaotic present. While she navigates the frantic final preparations for her own wedding, her children are at a summer camp that is rapidly spiraling into a nightmare. Amidst the turmoil, a mysterious, neglected girl named Mirela appears-a child of the shadows who seems to be a living link to a crime that time forgot. Maria must untangle a web of historical trauma and buried evidence before the shadows of the past claim more lives. On an island where the nurses were once forbidden to speak the truth, Maria Wern is the only one left to uncover what really happened in the wards of Lärbro-and who is still willing to kill to keep it quiet. In this gripping fifteenth installment of the Maria Wern series, international bestseller Anna Jansson delivers a powerful meditation on the vulnerability of children and the long, cold reach of history. 'A story well told, especially about the children' - Dagens Nyheter Sweden