About the Book

The latest installment in the popular crime series once again follows Taras Birsa, a senior criminal investigator with the Ljubljana Police Directorate. This time, he is sent to Gotenica near Kočevska Reka to attend a course in bloodstain pattern analysis. Even before the course begins, three cavers arrive at the police training center club with a startling discovery they made while descending into a newly discovered cave nearby. Taras calls in colleagues from Ljubljana, descends into the cave himself, and at its bottom finds the remains of an elderly man lying on a heap that, in the dim light of his headlamp, resembles a pile of fallen branches. As he examines the body and prepares it for transport to the surface, a branch beneath him snaps, and he realizes in shock that he is standing on a pile of mummified corpses. As it turns out, the dead in the cave are Slovenian Home Guard members killed after the war, believed to have been buried in the Ušiva Cave in the Kočevski Rog. More and more clues suggest a connection between those executed in 1945 and the man murdered and thrown into the cave—the latter, a retired employee of the Gotenica training center, is considered to have been an executioner involved in the 1945 killings. Taras is the only one who suspects that the two cases are not connected.