Investigative journalist Susan Ward is about to print the story of her career - proving long-rumoured allegations about a respected senator's affair with a young girl. But the day before her story is published, the senator is killed in a car crash.

When serial killer Gretchen Lowell captured her last victim - the man in charge of hunting her down - she quickly established who was really in control of the investigation. So why, after ten days of horrifying physical and mental torture, did she release Detective Archie Sheridan from the brink of death and hand herself in?

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.