Varg Veum is summoned by the chief of police Hamre to a hostage drama on a farm outside Bergen. A married couple have been brutally murdered, and all evidence points to their foster son, 16 year old Jan Egil. The kid refuses to talk to anyone else than to Veum, who knows him since childhood. He swears he had not killed his foster parents. But there is a couple social workers at the welfare home for stray kids, where Egil had landed when he was 1 year old. They got deeply touched by the drama as defenders of the young population of the social home, for it's been plagued by a new drogue called GHB (Hydroxybutyric acid) and several kids had died on it. When Egil declares himself guilty of the murder, Hamre, the chief of police, asks Veum to get his hands out of a solved case. But Veum discovers that Egil is been forced by the knowledge a disturbing reality concerning his foster father and this drug.