On a cold and rainy Stockholm night, nine bus riders are gunned down by an unknown assassin. The press, anxious for an explanation for the seemingly random crime, quickly dubs him a madman. But Superintendent Martin Beck of the Stockholm Homicide Squad suspects otherwise. This apparently motiveless killer has managed to target one of Beck's best detectives - and he, surely, would not have been riding that lethal bus without a reason.

The cunning incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the building's 11 occupants. And if one of Martin Beck's colleagues hadn't been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe because, for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain, a regulation fire truck has vanished. Was it terrorism, suicide, or simply a gas leak?

Someone is killing young girls in the once-peaceful parks of Stockholm - killing them after having his way. The people of Stockholm are tense and fearful. Police Superintendent Martin Beck has two witnesses: a cold-blooded mugger who won't say much and a three-year-old boy who can't say much. The dedicated work of the police force seems to be leading nowhere, and with each passing day, the likelihood of another murder grows. But then Beck remembers someone - or something - he overheard.

His holiday with his family has just begun, but a phone call sends Martin Beck packing off to Budapest, where a boorish journalist has vanished without a trace. With the aid of the coolly efficient local police, who do business while soaking at the public baths, Beck must troll about in the Eastern Europe underworld for a man nobody knows - while he is at the risk of vanishing along with his quarry.

A young blonde in sunglasses robs a bank and kills a hapless citizen. Across town, a corpse with a bullet shot through its heart is found in a locked room - with no gun at the scene. The crimes seem disparate, but to Martin Beck, they are two pieces of the same puzzle, and solving it becomes the one way he can escape the pains of his failed marriage and the lingering effects of a near-fatal bullet wound.

The thrilling ninth installment in the classic Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s - the novels that have inspired all crime fiction written ever since. In this penultimate instalment of the series, Beck is drawn into a case that turns up mysterious echoes of his past cases.

The bloody murder of a police captain in his hospital room exposes the particularly unsavory history of a man who spent 40 years practicing a horrible blend of strong-arm police work and shear brutality. Nonetheless, Martin Beck and his colleagues scour Stockholm for the murderer, a demented and deadly rifleman.

On a July afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from Sweden's beautiful Lake Vättern. Three months later, all that Police Inspector Martin Beck knows is that her name is Roseanna, that she came from Lincoln, Nebraska, and that she could have been strangled by any one of 85 people.

Detective Paul Hjelm and his team receive an urgent call from the FBI. A murderer whose methods bear a frightening resemblance to a serial killer they believed long dead is on his way to Sweden. For years the FBI hunted the so-called ‘Kentucky Killer’, their agents haunted by the terrible injuries he inflicted on his victims through his signature device: a weapon that squeezed the vocal cords shut.

Has he somehow returned from beyond the grave to torture a new generation, or do they have a copy-cat on their hands? And what do they want in Sweden?

After four years behind bars, notorious serial killer Thomas Kerr is ready to talk. And Chief Inspector William Wisting has been waiting to listen. Kerr has finally agreed to lead the police to his final victim's grave. But the expedition goes horribly wrong after his escape deep into the Norwegian forest. Wisting must launch a frantic search to find this cold-blooded killer before he strikes again. But the body of another woman, killed weeks before, has been found. Murdered in the same way as Kerr's victims. 

A solitary tent is found to contain the body of a half-buried woman. She’s been stoned to death. There are lash marks across her back. One of her hands has been cut off. Two years earlier Internet reporter Henning Juul lost his son, Jonas, in a domestic fire. As he returns to work, physically and emotionally scarred, Henning struggles to escape this past and to be taken seriously again as a reporter.

Disgraced, damaged former police officer Thorkild Aske has stopped taking his painkillers after his last experience searching for the missing in Northern Norway. Wracked by withdrawal and desperate for work, he reluctantly agrees to investigate the disappearance of two schoolgirls for best-selling crime writer Milla Lind - but he soon discovers that Lind’s interest in the case is not, as she claims, simply research for her latest novel. 

A Greek gangster arrives in Stockholm only to be murdered in a macabre fashion at Skansen zoo, his body consumed by animals. As the Intercrime Unit - a team dedicated to solving international violent crime - investigate what brought him to Sweden, eight Eastern European women vanish from a refugee centre outside the city while an elderly professor, the tattooed numbers on his arm hinting at his terrible past, is executed at the Jewish cemetery.

A man is found murdered in his Reykjavik flat. There are no obvious clues apart from a cryptic note left on the body and a photograph of a young girl's grave. Delving into the dead man's life Detective Erlendur discovers that 40 years ago he was accused of an appalling crime, but never convicted. Had his past come back to haunt him? As Erlendur struggles to build a relationship with his unhappy daughter, his investigation takes him to Iceland's Genetic Research Centre, where he uncovers disturbing secrets that are even darker than the murder of an old man.

In the coronary care unit at one of Copenhagen's leading medical centres, a nurse fills a syringe with an overdose of heart medication and stealthily enters the room of an older male patient. Six days earlier, a paperboy on his route in the centre of the city stumbles upon a macabre find: the body of a dead woman, lying in a fountain, her arms marked with small incisions. Cause of death? Exsanguination - the draining of all the blood in her body. Clearly, this is no ordinary murder.