Out of Sight (Gezichtsverlies) Pieter Toussaint, 2012 224 pages, 54.000 words ............................................   Download the factsheet ............................................   For more information, contact molegraaf@cossee.com

To whom do we owe a responsibility. To our parents, partners, children, our friends, or just to ourselves?

Viktor Rijshout is a Statistics professor at the University of Trondheim in Norway. One day he is visited by a senior official of the Ministry of Justice. The gentleman offers him a well-paid assignment in which Rijshout has to tinker with the values of science.

He knows why the assignment is so well-paid, but still he makes a calculation on the probability of the involvement of a nurse with the death of a group of children. Can statistics prove anything in a murder case?

The heavy criticism that follows remind him of the hardships of his life: lost friendships, a broken marriage and the death of his son. Chased by the executioners and the press he flees to his cabin in the mountains. But this is not where he will find peace of mind and more than ever he relives the day that his son drowned in the nearby lake. In a painfully detailed reconstruction Rijshout lowers himself into the ice cold water, hoping that science will help him find an answer to the untimely death of his son. Which could also give him salvation from the nagging feeling of guilt of which he doesn’t know the reason why it’s in his mind.