Fifth in the Kurt Wallander series. In an African convent, four nuns and a unidentified fifth woman are brutally murdered--the death of the unknown woman covered up by the local police. A year later in Sweden, Inspector Kurt Wallander is baffled and appalled by two murders. Holger Eriksson, a retired car dealer and bird watcher, is impaled on sharpened bamboo poles in a ditch behind his secluded home, and the body of a missing florist is discovered--strangled...

In October 1914, Swedish naval officer Lars Tobiasson-Svartman is sent on a secret mission to take depth readings around the Stockholm archipelago to help the Swedish army prepare to enter World War I.

Sweden, winter, 1991. 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. Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea, to Riga in Latvia, where he is plunged into...

Inspector Kurt Wallander's vacation plans are interrupted when he becomes involved in the search for a serial killer who scalps his victims.

Stefan Lindman, a young policeman just diagnosed with cancer of the tongue, travels to Harjedalen, Sweden to investigate the murder of a former colleague, who seems to have been hiding some shocking secrets about his involvement in the Holocaust.

Archaeologist Louise Cantor's life takes a sad and unexpected turn when she returns home from Greece to find her grown son, Henrik, dead in his own bed, and unable to accept the ruling of suicide, Louise embarks on a quest to learn the surprising truth about her son who was harboring many secrets, including the fact that he was HIV-positive.

Hans Olofson, a Swede who was raised by an alcoholic father and was forever changed by the deaths of two friends, journeys to Zambia where he tries to make a home on an egg farm, but has a difficult time assimilating to the culture.

Jesper Humlin is a poet of middling acclaim who is saddled by his underwhelming book sales, an exasperated girlfriend, a demanding mother, and a rapidly fading tan. His boy-wonder stockbroker has squandered Humlin's investments, and his editor, who says he must write a crime novel to survive, begins to pitch and promote the nonexistent book despite Humlin's emphatic refusals. Then, when he travels to Gothenburg to give a reading, he finds himself...

"The year is 1911. The young rock blaster Oskar Johansson has been killed in an accident. Or so it says in the local newspaper. In spite of serious injuries, however, Oskar survives. Decades later, Oskar looks back and reflects on his working life as an invalid, his marriage, his dreams, and his hopes. Oskar's life is woven together out of fragments of voices, images, and episodes that, taken together, provide a sharp and precise picture of life in...

Now almost fourteen, Joel becomes a local hero to his small Swedish town when he saves an old man from freezing to death in the woods.