Twelve days. One road. Nobody leaves, and somebody is not telling the truth. Spiti Valley, January 2019. Sub-Inspector Ruchika Thakur has come to the end of the world to scatter her father's ashes. Then an avalanche buries the only road, and a small village at nearly four thousand metres is cut off from everything: the phone, the doctor, the law. On the fourth morning a guest from Delhi is found dead in the frozen channel behind the gompa wall. It looks like a fall on the ice. Ruchika is on leave, and she has no badge, no lab and no way to call for one. She has a dozen strangers, a failing satellite phone, and a watch that her father wore for thirty years. Someone in the house is lying. The road will not open for eight more days.