In Silence of the Grave, a corpse is found on a hill outside the city, and Detective Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson and his team think the body may have been buried for some years." "While Erlendur struggles to hold together the crumbling fragments of his own family, slowly but surely he finds out the truth about another unhappy family. Few people are still alive who can tell the tale, but even secrets taken to the grave cannot remain hidden forever....

Unofficially investigating a suspicious suicide, Inspector Erlendur becomes increasingly unsettled by the unsolved cases of two young people who went missing decades earlier under circumstances tied to his own past.