There was a double homicide on the forgotten Swedish countryside several years ago. Two angry young men beat two young women to death, seemingly without any particular reason. The years passed but the images in our heads did not disappear. We tried to forget it, wrote screenplay after screenplay, but we always came back to those murders, and to telling the story about a part of Sweden that we never read about in newspapers, and that is populated by people whose thoughts and destinies rarely reaches beyond their village.
Claudio Dragonetti is an Italian assassin, one of the best in the industry. He is hired by a local mafia boss in Gothenburg, Ivan. He needs Dragonettis services to get rid of the two competitors. The job is nothing special really. This is something that Claudio Dragonetti done many times before. But this time something goes wrong and he accidentally kills the wrong people. This is appreciated neither by the Mafia or the Swedish authorities and Dragonetti soon finds that he is driven from two directions. But Claudio Dragonetti has a trump card which none of his enemies know. He has signed a pact with Satan, a pact that makes him almost invulnerable, all he had to leave in return was his own immortal soul.
The seemingly random murder of a jogger in woodland and the detonation of car bombs in central Ystad are but diversions to busy the police whilst a security van are robbed of 15 million kroner. Isabelle and Portus witness this and give chase but are attacked by the criminals and hospitalized. Given the security firm's meticulous contingency plan Wallander suspects a leak from the inside and aims for Micke Sterner, a compulsive gambler and the only staff member to know the encoded transit schedules. But some private sleuthing by over-worked Svartman, who has found the robbers' den, and Wallander's suspicions of an ex-cop turned security officer with connections to the firm provide the real break-through.
In a time of social change and unrest, war and poverty, a young working class woman, Maria, wins a camera in a lottery. The decision to keep it alters her whole life.
