He calls himself Ulf--as good a name as any, he thinks--and the only thing he's looking for is a place where he won't be found by Oslo's most notorious drug lord: the Fisherman. He was once the Fisherman's fixer, but after betraying him, Ulf is now the one his former boss needs fixed--which may not be a problem for a man whose criminal reach is boundless. When Ulf gets off the bus in Kasund, on Norway's far northeastern border, he sees a "flat, monotonous, bleak landscape . . . the perfect hiding place. Hopefully."

The locals--native Sami and followers of a particularly harsh Swedish version of Christianity--seem to accept Ulf's explanation that he's come to hunt, even if he has no gun and the season has yet to start. And a bereaved, taciturn woman and her curious, talkative young son supply him with food, the use of a cabin deep in the woods, a weapon--and companionship that stirs something in him he thought was long dead.

But the agonizing wait for the inevitable moment when the Fisherman's henchmen will show--the midnight sun hanging in the sky like an unblinking, all-revealing eye--forces him to question if redemption is at all possible or if, as he's always believed, "hope is a real bastard."

From the Hardcover edition.