Four years have passed since Cecilia Karlsson disappeared from the island of Gräsö in Roslagen. When Ann Lindell receives a tip that she has been seen alive, she cannot help getting involved, even though she is no longer with the police. The black sheep of the island, Nils Lindberg, has never forgotten Cecilia Karlsson, with whom he was in love as a teenager. He may not be completely sober all the time, but he has no doubt of what he saw out on the bay just before Cecilia disappeared. While Ann struggles to put the jigsaw puzzle together, she is trying to establish herself in her new life together with her lover, Edvard. At the same time, someone is hiding in a cottage in a remote part of the island. Someone who is looking for revenge.

Police inspector Ann Lindell has left the Uppsala police and is living a quiet life, producing local cheese in a small town in Uppland. But life in the country is not as idyllic as it seems. On New Year’s Eve, someone sets fire to the former village school that is now a home for asylum seekers, and three people are killed. Ann Lindell’s investigative instincts come back to life, and soon she takes on the case. She is contacted by a person who has been involved in a previous investigation and wants to warn her. His message is short and clear: Many will die. A few weeks later, a bomb explodes in a suburb of Stockholm.

One sunny summer morning, a young woman and her six-year-old daughter are run over by a car. Both are killed immediately. Is it an accident, or did someone kill them on purpose? The same morning, the husband of the deceased young woman disappears. During the police investigation, it turns out that the husband had recently bought a property that nobody knew anything about. A few days later, a macabre discovery is made in a forest nearby.

Professor Bertram von Ohler has been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine. This news causes problems in his otherwise quiet upper-class neighborhood in Uppsala, Sweden, as not everybody is happy with the choice of winner. Mysterious incidents start to occur. “Boyish pranks” say the police, but what follows is certainly not innocent amusement. Detective Inspector Ann Lindell becomes involved in the case and immediately is transported back into her own past.

A Swedish county commissioner disappears, and many years later, one of the town’s natives is convinced that he’s caught a glimpse of the missing man while traveling in Bangalore, India. Meanwhile, Ann Lindell is investigating a case of a severed female foot found where a striking number of inhabitants are single men --- and the two cases may be crucially connected.