Inger Gammelgaard Madsen:

Dødens sommer (The summer of death)

2024. 384 pages. 

ISBN 978-87-973572-7-9

Forlaget Farfalla.

17th volume in the Rolando Benito series.

Police Commissioner Rolando Benito from East Jutland Police has bought a summer house on the coast in Ebeltoft with a view of the small island of Hjelm in the Kattegat and is looking forward to a good, long summer holiday with the family. The summer house just needs to be renovated first. While cleaning out a shed, Roland's daughter finds a small wooden chest. The chest contains pictures and old letters saved by the previous owner of the house, a fisherman, as well as newspaper clippings about three fishermen who disappeared within two weeks in the summer four years ago and were never found. The letters give Rolando an insight into the tragic life of a young woman on Hjelm back in the 50s, when the island was inhabited. Roland becomes interested in the fate of the young woman and her daughter and in this connection discovers that there are several terrible secrets hidden in the cottage that cannot stand the light of day.

Journalist Anne Larsen from Media House Denmark is working on the murder of the digging journalist Johanne Münster in her crime program CrimeWatch. The journalist was found shot to death in his car in a harbor basin in Aarhus Harbour. It is believed that she was killed because of a task that she was doing. But what was it that the digging journalist had found out that might have cost her her life? Anne decides to go ahead with Johanne Münster's work, and the case brings her to Ebeltoft Fiskerihavn. Here she accidentally meets Rolando Benito, who is working on the same case, which leads back to the summer of 2019, when the three fishermen disappeared at sea. But the reason for their disappearance turns out to be much more macabre than expected.