Martin, a law student, takes up a job as a nightwatchman at a mortuary to fund his studies. But the mortuary harbours a dark secret, and he has to find the truth before he is implicated in a serial murder case.
Set in the neurosurgical ward of Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet, the city and country's main hospital, nicknamed "Riget", "Riget" means "the realm" or "the kingdom" and leads one to think of "dødsriget", the realm of the dead.
The Kingdom is the most technologically advanced hospital in Denmark, a gleaming bastion of medical science. A rash of uncanny occurrences, however, begins to weaken the staff's faith in science – a phantom ambulance pulls in every night, but disappears; voices echo in the elevator shaft; and a pregnant doctor's fetus seems to be developing much faster than is natural.
