Chief Inspector Van Veeteren knew that murder cases were never as open-and-shut as this one: Janek Mitter woke one morning with a brutal hangover and discovered his wife of three months lying facedown in the bathtub, dead. With only the flimsiest excuse as his defense, he is found guilty of a drunken crime of passion and imprisoned in a mental institution. But Van Veeteren's suspicions about the identity of the killer are borne out when Mitter also...

It's a sweltering summer in Sweden and Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is long overdue for a holiday when a secretive and dubious religious sect comes under investigation. One of its members, a girl on the cusp of adolescence, is found dead in the forest near their holiday camp, brutally raped and strangled. The members of the Pure Life choose to remain silent about the incident rather than defend themselves.

In the middle of the night, a boy is struck by a car after leaving his girlfriend's house. The driver, drunk, leaves the boy's body by the side of the road and, wrestling with guilt, tries to put it all out of his mind, until a blackmail note arrives. In the meantime, Reinhart, the new chief inspector of the Maardam police force, has set his team to work. But a second, possibly related killing proves that this is no ordinary case. The police, desperate...

Sweden in the ’60s. Erik and his friend Edmund spend their vacation by a forest lake daydreaming about Ewa, a young substitute teacher with an uncanny resemblance to the actress Kim Novak. The boys are having the time of their lives until a shocking discovery disrupts their world. Twenty-five years later, Erik comes across a newspaper article about unsolved crimes and is overwhelmed by memories and questions from that summer of his youth. What actually...

1987. Verlangan, a former cop turned private detective is hired by a woman to follow her husband Jaan 'G' Hennan. A few days later, his client is found dead at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. Maardam police, led by Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, investigate the case. Van Veeteren has encountered Jaan 'G' Hennan before and knows only too well the man's dark capabilities. As more information emerges about G's shadowy past, the Chief Inspector becomes...