Heart of Lead

Investigations of an old murder unearth a cross-generational secret.

Beneath the floorboards of the Old Vicarage in Jyväskylä, a skeleton is discovered during renovations. The deceased is a young woman whose time of death dates to the late 1960s. Alongside the skeleton is a metal box containing a small baby’s lace dress and Jean-Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit.”

Detectives Matilda Metso and Elmo Vauramo find four young women in old investigation archives who fit the victim’s profile. One of them went missing in the Pyhä-Häkki National Park in 1968, and three others drowned in a boating accident at Tuomiojärvi in the same year. Could the body in the Old Vicarage be one of them?

In 1943, Amélie Bonnet is arrested and taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. There, she befriends a woman and her daughter. Before her death, the friend asks Amélie for a special favour: “Will you kill my child before they do?” Amélie decides to do the exact opposite – she intends to do everything in her power to ensure the child survives the camp.

How are Amélie, the skeleton found in the vicarage, and the girls who disappeared in the 1960s connected to each other?