Three young friends meet in a wood to act out an elaborate masque. But, unknown to them, they are being watched. Each is killed by a single bullet. Soon afterwards, one of Inspector Wallander's colleagues is found murdered. Is this the same killer, and what could the connection be? In this investigation, Wallander is always one step behind.

This tale marks the end of the Kurt Wallander mysteries and yet leads back to Wallander's Ystad, where a new series of thrillers can begin. Stefan Lindman investigates the murder of a former police colleague and to his horror uncovers links to a global web of neo-Nazi activity.

One frozen January morning at 5 am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he believes is a routine call out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, both victims of a violence beyond reason.

Stopping to use a cash machine one evening, a man inexplicably falls to the ground: dead. A taxi driver is brutally murdered by two teenage girls. Quickly apprehended they appeal local policemen with their total lack of remorse. One girl escapes police custody and disappears without trace. Soon afterwards, a blackout covers half the country.

Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off. A few days later a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead. The dead men were criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But what appears to be an open-and-shut case soon takes on a far more sinister aspect.

Four nuns and a fifth woman, a visitor to Africa, are killed in a savage night-time attack. Inspector Kurt Wallander is home from an idyllic holiday in Rome. But when he investigates the disappearance of an elderly birdwatcher, he discovers a gruesome and meticulously planned murder - a body impaled in a trap of sharpened bamboo poles.