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Informationen zum Autor Max Seeck Klappentext "The fourth novel in the New York Times bestselling Ghosts of the Past series featuring homicide detective Jessica Niemi! Jessica Niemi is ordered to go on paid leave after a violent altercation, and she decides to travel to a small island in the êAland archipelago to escape attention and find some peace. Meanwhile, a group arrives on the island, and Jessica learns that they are the remaining members of the Doves, people who had to flee from Finland to Sweden during World War II and ended up living in an orphanage on the very same island. Jessica soon hears a local legend about a girl who also inhabited the orphanage. Every night at two o'clock, the girl would put on her blue coat and stand on the pier, looking out at the dark water. One night she disappeared and was never found. Not long after Jessica hears the story of the girl in blue, one of the remaining Doves dies. Jessica soon finds out that two other people have mysteriously died on the island, and they all seem to have something to do with the missing girl. Jessica can't be sure whether she's facing a killer or-just like the legend says-the ghost of the girl in the blue coat. While battling her own demons, uncertain what is real and what is not, Jessica searches for the truth to keep from becoming the next victim"-- Leseprobe 1 2020 The hum is so soft that it isn't really disturbing. Even so, Jessica can't help but notice it. The other woman is waiting for her to speak, has been for almost a minute now. The thought in Jessica's head is unusually clear, but uttering it requires effort. "I guess I'm trying to say . . . I'd anchored my life in another person's presence," she begins, and is caught off guard by the confident note in her voice. "Saw it from someone else's perspective. Does that make any sense?" The woman sitting across from Jessica in a beige armchair doesn't immediately respond, uses the silence to encourage Jessica to continue thinking out loud. She is skilled at leading; the session seems to be progressing according to a predetermined choreography instead of there being two equals sitting there in armchairs, conversing without an agenda. Everything is clinical and coordinated, but Jessica doesn't let it bother her. She knew what she was getting into when she started her psychotherapy sessions a month ago. "Before I met Erne . . . I was lost. I didn't understand it at the time . . . And now-" Suddenly Jessica's voice thickens as if she is forbidden from continuing. As if someone else is forbidding her. The therapist doesn't rush Jessica; she sits in her seat, adjusts her grip on her ballpoint pen. Retracts the tip, then clicks it back out. Under some circumstances, the intermittently repeated mannerism would make a restless impression, but the psychiatrist repeats it in a controlled fashion. Jessica looks at the woman's angular knuckles and light blue fingernails. They're surprisingly glossy, and for this reason it is somehow brazen for them to be the fingernails of a doctor specializing in psychiatry: a client opening up her heart might have the right to expect something more conservative. More empathetic. Something that shows her therapist isn't above the situation. "Jessica?" Jessica looks up at her therapist's face. "What?" There's a break in her train of thought; perhaps her brain was trying to scan for visual stimuli as an excuse for her to stop talking. A tender look creeps across the therapist's suntanned face. "Please go on. You were saying that you were lost, and now . . ." It takes Jessica a moment to reorder her thoughts. She doesn't actually want to reveal her insight to this woman-or to anyone else, for that matter-but at the same time she is burning with a desire to hear the conclusion articulated out loud, to let the words spill out for a professional to assess. She w...
