Inspector Kurt Wallander's long-anticipated vacation plans are interrupted by two horrific deaths: the self-immolation of an unidentified young woman and the brutal murder of the former minister of justice. As the police struggle to piece together the few clues they have, the killer strikes again and again. What connection is there between a retired minister of justice, a successful art dealer, and a common petty thief? Why does the killer scalp his...

Ystad, Sweden, fall 1997. Two teenage girls brutally murder a taxi driver. Although they are quickly apprehended, one of them escapes police custody and disappears without a trace. A few days later, a man stops at an ATM during his evening walk and suddenly falls dead to the ground. Shortly thereafter, a blackout cuts power to a large swath of southern Sweden. When a serviceman arrives at the malfunctioning power substation, he makes a grisly discovery....

Linda Wallander is bored. Just graduated from the police academy, she is waiting to start work at the Ystad police station and move into her own apartment. Meanwhile, she's living with her father and, like fathers and daughters everywhere, they are driving each other crazy. Nor will they be able to escape each other when she moves out. Her father is Inspector Kurt Wallander, a veteran of the Ystad police force, whom she will have to work alongside....

Early one morning, a small-town farmer discovers that his neighbors have been victims of a brutal attack during the night: An old man has been bludgeoned to death, and his tortured wife lies dying before the farmer's eyes. The only clue is the single word she utters before she dies: "foreign." In charge of the investigation is Inspector Kurt Wallander, a local detective whose personal life is in a shambles. His family is falling apart, he's gaining...

Inspector Kurt Wallander returns in the second of Henning Mankell's award-winning, internationally bestselling detective series, this time to investigate a horrific crime in his Scandinavian homeland somehow linked to a troubled apartheid-era South Africa. When the tenacious sleuth's search for the truth behind the execution-style killing of a Swedish housewife uncovers a plot to assassinate Nelson Mandela, Wallander finds himself in a tangle with...

A taxi driver is brutally murdered by two young girls who seem to have no real motive for their actions. Elsewhere, a man dies of a heart attack in the middle of Ystad's main square. When Wallander discovers that these two seemingly separate cases connect

Under a wide blue sky in a bright yellow rapeseed field, a young woman burns herself to death. Later, a former politician is found brutally murdered - killed with a single blow to the skull and scalped. Then a rich art dealer is killed in exactly the same

Wallander investigates the brutal slaying of an elderly couple at an isolated farmhouse. A police leak of the wife's dying words leads to an outbreak of racist reprisals in Ystad. The fallout from the case leads Wallander to doubt everything, including his abilities as a police officer.

Anna, a friend of Wallander's daughter, turns up out of the blue looking for help. When she disappears, Wallander is forced to break the silence with his daughter Linda. The investigations lead Wallander to a Christian cult, with a vendetta against modern society.

With the promise of a new start Kurt Wallander moves into a new home with his girlfriend Vanja. Their happiness is cut short when Wallander's dog unearths a skeleton buried in his garden. The body is of a murdered girl, dead for over ten years. Is this fate or coincidence?