After she returns to her hometown to learn that her friend, Alex, was found in an ice-cold bath with her wrists slashed, biographer Erica Falck researches her friend's past in hopes of writing a book and joins forces with Detective Patrik Hedstrom, who has his own suspicions about the case.

When a young girl's body is pulled out of the harbor in the small Swedish resort town of Fjallbacka, Det. Patrik Hedström becomes the lead investigator as he struggles with lazy and inept colleagues and an even remoter-than-usual boss. It's his grim task to discover who could be behind the murder of the child both he and his partner Erica knew well.

The discovery of two murder victims who were killed twenty years earlier is complicated by the body of a third, recent victim at the same location, a case that compels detective Patrik Hedstrom to investigate a feuding clan of misfits, religious fanatics, and criminals.