The death is an odd one, even in Cnut's jaded murder book: Jacob Jacobsen, totally against character, apparently gets out of bed in the early hours of a bitterly cold morning, and drives down to his fish farm, in order to wind up dead – tangled in one of the nets, with his head gashed open.

It seems to be a one-off murder, but then, when Jacob's brother Harald goes missing, Cnut finds out that it is open-season on the whole Jacobsen family – due to the crazy inclination of old man Jacob, the father of the extended family, who has, in his will, determined that the family businesses shall be subject to the same type of dispersal as in a business-style tontine – the last-man-standing-gets-it-all arrangement – an arrangement that, in Cnut's estimation, is an open demand for the brothers, sisters, and nephews to kill each other.