Fear Of Broken Glass

https://elementamundi.com/theelements/prologue/

Gothia: Sweden. Autumn of 1987
A notorious wilderness with a macabre past. A reconstructed Viking church by a lake. And a painting, a lost masterpiece framed in runic inscriptions without an owner.
Fear Of Broken Glass is a gritty, violent, historically layered crime-mystery thriller about isolation, deception, survival and the discovery of a mysterious hidden past, set amidst the power and beauty of the Swedish hinterland in the fall.

Hasse Almquist is a detective with a tarnished reputation brought to an ancient site of pagan worship, Troll Church Hill in the Tiveden National Park in Sweden where a body is discovered without any eyes, nails hammered through the feet.
Ash and Justin visit an old Pastor at a place named after the infamous daughter of a Viking-age legend. On the way back to their homestead they find Ulrika hitch-hiking in the middle of an empty road in the rain...

Synopsis

Almquist is called upon to solve the crime linking the victim with a similar pattern of four unsolved murders from the 1970's, murders with a link to pagan practices in the past. He discovers the victim's interest in a miniature painting by an unknown artist, his enquiries taking him to nearby Gotfrid's Homestead, temporary home to Ash and Justin and the remaining members of the group the deceased victim had been a part of together with the alluring Swedish hitchhiker Ulrika.

Their investigation reveals the deeds of the mysterious organization called the Foundation, the affairs of a regional Church Diocese with a mirky past, a reconstructed Viking Church on the shore of a lake and the reasons behind the deaths of local residents Anna and Gustav Wikfors over a decade previous.

Only Almquist and Vikland realize too late, they have opened Pandora's box as investigator and suspects alike become unwilling participants in a greater and much darker universe than the one they thought they inhabited.