1950s, rural Ireland. A loner comes across a mysteriously empty car in a field. Knowing he shouldn’t approach, but unable to hold back, he soon finds himself embroiled in a troubling missing person’s case, as a husband claims his wife may have thrown herself into the sea.

Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector Strafford, who soon turns to his old ally – the flawed but brilliant pathologist Quirke – a man he is linked to in increasingly complicated ways.

He has little to say about the dead girl. He killed her, he says, because he was physically capable of doing so. It made perfect sense to smash her head in with a hammer.

What he cannot understand, and would desperately like to know, is why he was so moved by an unattributed portrait of a middle-aged woman that he felt compelled to steal it . . .