As the dreary, bitter weather lately fall descends on Minneapolis, Detective Nikki Liska is restless, currently bored with her new assignment to the cold case squad. She misses the hurry of pulling an all-nighter as well as the sense of urgency of hunting a desperate killer in the loose. Primarily she misses her older partner, Sam Kovac.

Kovac is having a straight harder time adjusting to Liska’s lack, saddled with a green new partner younger than the majority of Sam’s closet. But Kovac is normally distracted from about The Bitter Period his difficulties by a particularly brutal dual homicide: a prominent university or college professor and his wife, bludgeoned and hacked to loss of life in their home with a ceremonial Japanese samurai sword. Liska’s case-the unsolved murder of the decorated sex offences detective-is less of the distraction: Twenty-five years afterwards, there is little hope for locating the killer who got apart.

Meanwhile, Minneapolis citizen Evi Burke has a existence she only imagined as a kid in and out of foster homes: a lovely home, a family, people who love her, a fulfilling job. But a risk from her past is certainly stalking her idyllic present. A risk bent on destroying an ideal life she was under no circumstances meant to have.

As the trails of two offences a quarter of a hundred years apart twist and combination, Kovac and Liska competition to find answers before a killer hits again.