Sweden winter 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander & 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-&-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 a frozen alien world of police surveillance scarcely veiled threats & lies. Doomed always to be one step behind the shadowy figures he pursues only Wallander's obstinate desire to see that justice is done brings the truth to light.