It's one shocking surprise after another with Claudia. After a very modest life in Sweden, her single mother, a Latvian refugee, marries a successful Canadian doctor and they move to Canada. Following in her mother's footsteps, Claudia, too, marries a successful surgeon. She lives an enviable perfect life with her handsome husband and four children (not all of them perfect). But behind the perfect fa ade she hides the shame and guilt of the past: the murders she witnessed, and her involvement in them. It's her dirty secret to take to the grave. It's not until later in life, living alone in her big house, and after witnessing yet another senseless murder that, fed up with feeling cursed, she finds the courage to face the trauma of the past, those incidents she herself had a part in - when she and her girlfriends found that shunned girl from their class raped strangled in the park during their lunch break, and then, and when seven years later she found one of those girlfriends, Anneli, on a beach in Spain with her throat cut. She remembers how she stood looking at Anneli wondering if she had been killed because of what she said that time when they stood around that other girl's dead body in the park. They were not kind words. None of them had showed any empathy. Is Claudia to be punished as well at some point? For that same lack of empathy? It's no wonder that has never felt really safe, always surrounded her with talismans for protection, her husband being the greatest talisman of them all. In the end he can't help her either. Then suddenly her Latvian mother decides to return to Riga after sixty years, insisting Claudia comes along. Claudia, having nothing better to do, agrees, afraid to let her frail old mother travel alone. In Riga her mother grows increasingly distant as she chases a past that is no longer there. But eventually they make two discoveries. One is a happy one; a part of the past has survived into the present. The other is one of terror that makes Claudia's past traumas seem irrelevant. It also makes both her and her mother sit down late one evening and confess dark secrets to each other, dark secrets that time has faded. But the question now is: will she have the strength and the empathy to deal with this latest disaster, a disaster that involved family? And will the family ties prove strong enough? They must, because family is all she has left. This is a story both serious and humorous in a dark blend.
