Paid in Spades

Elvind Jansen leaves prison after twenty years, with what he is sure is a foolproof scheme for a future life of luxury. Three days later he is dead – shot on the 6th tee of Måttesby golf course. Digging in a bank of earth for the bullet, the SOCOs find it – embedded in the skull of a skeleton that has lain there for ten years. When Jansen's sister is killed, Cnut is faced with three murders and a host of suspects. Blackmail seems the likely motive for the first two, but which of the dozen or so residents of Måttesby was the subject of the blackmail, and is he or she the killer? Are the three deaths connected, and if so, how? Cnut has other desperate problems, both personal and professional.To pile on the misery, a man who hates him is placed as his superior, in a job he himself has turned down twice, and comes gunning for him. Desperate, he hits the bottle for the first time in his life – and continues to do so. Cnut becomes convinced that the residents of the new houses in the small village are connected in some way, not only to the deaths and to each other, but also to Arne Bredsson, the entrepreneur who owns the whole complex, and believes that therein lies the key to the mystery. The DNA from the skeleton brings a further strange twist, though the detectives still have no identification. When they finally obtain that knowledge, along with other family history, they know who was being blackmailed, though that person is obviously innocent of the murders, and those murders are not all they have to deal with. New facts they obtain reveal a tale of sexual depravity so horrific that Ilse feels physically sick. With all the answers in his possession, Cnut has two life or death decisions to make…