Myrin (Jar City) starts off at the Iceland Genetic Research Inc. headquarters, where one of the two protagonists works as a biologist. Irony has it that his five year old daughter has taken ill with a rare, fatal, hereditary brain disease; only that nobody in his family has ever heard of the disease before. Despair drives him to look for answers and he'll have nothing stand in his way. We also follow another father/daughter relationship in police detective Erlendur, the other protagonist and Eva, who at the age of twenty, is trapped in the underworld of drugs and misfortune. Erlendur's investigation of a murder takes an unexpected turn when forensic evidence leads him on the trail of a death of a young girl, 30 years earlier. While helpless in dealing with his own daughter's problems, he gets more and more determined to find out what happened to the dead little girl. His research leads him to digging up her bones, while the young biologist has to take on the hard task of burying his daughter. The two stories become intertwined with an unexpected twist, leading us deep into the maze of the genetic bloodline of a whole nation and leaving us to question ourselves on important moral issues.