It is Christmas in the Alpine town of Furth Am See and a six-year-old girl is playing ludo with her grandfather. The doorbell rings, and the old man gets up. The next time the girl sees her grandfather, he is lying by the barn, his skull broken, his face a mashed pulp against the white snow. From that time on, she does not speak a single word.

Detective Ludwig Kovacs sits in snowbound beer gardens by day and peers through a telescope at night. Year-end crimes are always a nuisance, he finds, not least because they disrupt his erotic schedule with Marlene, the owner of a secondhand shop. And although he does not mind an excuse to extract himself from Marlene's romantic New Year plans, this victim, he is quite sure, will keep him busy well into January.

Raffael Horn, the psychiatrist engaged to treat the silent child, reluctantly becomes involved in solving the murder along with Kovacs. Their parallel researches sweep through the town — a young mother who believes her newborn child is the devil, a Benedictine monk who uses his iPod to drown out the voices in his head, a suicidal pensioner who introduces Horn to the joys of beekeeping, a high-spending teenager who tortures cats. The psychological profile of this claustrophobic, winter-held town is not reassuring — but which inhabitant was the brutal night-time slayer of the suffering girl's grandfather?

This double investigation is an original conceit from a very gifted writer, whose narrative is as subtle as it is gripping.