Tracking a sadistic killer, detective Kurt Wallander follows a string of incidents -- attacks on domestic animals, ritualistic murders of humans -- with help from his daughter, Linda, a new member of the Ystad police force.

A man enters the bank with something resembling a bomb around his neck. He demands that money is transferred into an account, or he will blow up the bank. The man is known as the village idiot, and claims that Sitting Bull is his father. No one take the case to seriously until they find that the bomb is real. Is the village idiot acting on his own, or are there more people involved? A long and complicated investigation is started by Kurt Wallander and his colleagues.

The dead couple Olof and Carolina Wachman are found murdered in their magnificent estate. The investigation finds that she has been tortured and raped in front of her husband before they were both killed. A death that must have been a relief after the torture they both went through.

Kurt Wallanders daughter Linda and DI Stefan Lindman now have to show that they are as good a pair of investigators as Kurt Wallander himself.

Slowly but surely we see that the murder is about revenge, a revenge that can be traced back 20 years.

An American woman is found murdered in Ystad. She has visited an internationally renowned photographer in Ystad, and her husband suspects her of infidelity. Kurt Wallander digs deeper into the woman’s background and her husband, as he believes that there is more to the case than meets the eye. The solution turns out to come from far outside of Sweden.

A lorry has been parked outside of Ystad for several days, and when PC Linda Wallander investigates the lorry she finds it full of dead people. The only survivor is a small child. The Dead have no ID's or documentation and the lorry is stolen. The police start a difficult case to try to find the people behind the crime.

Eleven year old Johannes is found dead in a crevice. The postmortem shows that the boy has been sexually abused and beaten to death. Detectiv Stefan Lindman is a member of the same shooting club as the victims father and they are also friends. Therefore he becomes the one that has to tell the father what has happened to his son (Johannes). When the father finally understands what has happened he demands that Stefan personally gets the one responsible. Stefan is since a previous case being accused for abuse, because the internal investigation Stefan has to go on paid vacation, and he is not allowed to continue his investigation. But because of personal issues he continues the investigation anyway. He has a dark secret, a secret that has the answer to why he came to Ysta in the first place.