The main story is told in third-person through the eyes of Volkspolizei detective Oberleutnant Karin Müller, who is investigating the murder of a teenage girl found in a cemetery in East Berlin, apparently having been shot by western guards while attempting to escape into the East.

Müller’s ‘handler’ is Stasi lieutenant colonel Klaus Jäger who warns her the investigation is limited to identifying the girl – not challenging the official version of the killing.

Müller disregards this warning, and her story eventually coincides with a first-person narrative told in the present tense by Irma Behrendt.

Irma is an inmate of a severe Jugendwerkhof housed in the former Nazi holiday complex of Prora on the island of Rügen.

[3] Crime fiction expert and author Barry Forshaw said that while the story has echoes of Tom Rob Smith and Philip Kerr, ‘Young has a notably individual voice’.