One of the singers in a Salvation Army concert is shot in the head at point-blank range and killed. Investigator Harry Hole has little to work with. As the search closes in, the killer becomes increasingly desperate, and Harry’s chase takes him to the most forbidden corners of the former Yugoslavia. Yet it’s when he returns to Oslo that he encounters true darkness: among the homeless junkies and Salvationists, eagerly awaiting a savior to deliver them from misery.

Former police officer Harry Hole must return to Oslo when the son of the woman he loves is arrested for murder. In order to prove the boy's innocence, Harry sets out on a dangerous investigation that takes him into the world of the most virulent drug to ever hit the streets of Oslo (and the careers of some of the city's highest officials).

Deeply traumatized by the Snowman investigation, Inspector Harry Hole has lost himself in the squalor of Hong Kong’s opium dens. But when a series of women are murdered --- after all spending the night at the same isolated mountain hostel --- he agrees to return to Oslo to investigate the brutal case.

It is Oslo in November, and the first snow of the season has fallen. A boy named Jonas wakes in the night to find his mother gone. Antihero police investigator Harry Hole suspects a link between a menacing letter and the disappearance of Jonas’s mother --- and of perhaps a dozen other women, all of whom went missing on the day of a first snowfall.