A friend of Wallander's daughter comes begging for his help but then disappears. Meanwhile, an elderly woman's body is found cremated in a shallow grave. Killed by a seemingly religious obsessive, Wallander must catch the culprit before he strikes again.

Wallander moves into a dream home with his new girlfriend. But his happiness is shattered when the skeleton of a girl is discovered in the garden. Wallander must try to get his new life back on track by finding her killer, but the case is not as cold as he thinks.

After two Eastern European corpses are washed ashore on a raft in Ystad, Wallander travels to Latvia on the hunt for the killers. Thrown into a cold, alien world of police surveillance and lies, Wallander soon finds himself entangled in a web of corruption with no-one to trust.