In the middle of an unusually hot Swedish summer, a young woman studying at the Vaxjo Police Academy is brutally murdered. Police Inspector Evert Bäckström is unwillingly drafted in from Stockholm to head up the investigation. Egotistical, vain and utterly prejudiced against everything, Bäckström is a man who has no sense of duty or responsibility, thinks everyone with the exception of himself is an imbecile and is only really capable of warm feelings towards his pet goldfish and the nearest bottle of liquor.

Stockholm1975: Six young people take the entire staff of the West German embassy hostage, demanding that the Baader-Meinhof members being held as prisoners in West Germany be released immediately. The long siege ends with the deaths of two hostages and the wounding of several others, including the captors. 1989: When a Swedish civil servant is murdered, the two leading detectives on the case, Anna Holt and Bo Jarnebring, find their investigation hastily shelved by an incompetent and corrupt senior.

Selma Falck's personal life and career as a lawyer have hit rock bottom. That is until Hege Chin Morell - Norway's best female skier - approaches her desperate to overturn a doping charge. With two months to the Winter Olympics, Selma faces the seemingly almost impossible task of clearing Morell's name. However, when a male skier is found dead after a training accident, it becomes clear to Selma that there is something more serious at risk. Encountering corruption, hidden enmity and shady connections, the pattern of recent crimes and ancient sins becomes undeniable.

It's August 2007, and Lars Martin Johansson, chief of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Sweden, has opened the files on the unsolved murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme. With his retirement quickly closing in, Johansson forms a new group comprised of a few trustworthy detectives who doggedly wade through mountains of paperwork and pursue new leads in a case that has all but gone cold despite the open wound the assassination has left on the consciousness of Swedish society.

An unmissable hospital appointment is looming for Inspector Van Veeteren when a corpse is found rolled in a rotting carpet by a young child playing in a local beauty spot. Missing head and limbs, the torso is too badly decomposed for forensic identification - bar one crucial detail.... Circumstantial evidence soon points to a local man, a double murderer who disappeared nine months before, shortly after being released on parole - a local hero turned monster after being convicted of killing two women over a span of three decades.