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.

A blue car is parked by a side road in the beautiful landscape of Skåne in southern Sweden. A child sits alone without an adult in sight. The child's father has been reported as missing, while the mother is in a psychiatric institution, unresponsive and apathetic. Kurt Wallander's failing health sees Linda take the lead in the case. It will touch her deeply as she discovers that the child has been unscrupulously tricked, exploited and humiliated.

The national election is approaching, and the Ystad town square is plastered with election posters with local labour party candidate Kenneth Nillson, a politician fighting the fear of immigrants as his electoral focal point. He sees it as his duty to clean Skane's reputation as being racist.

At the same time a train rolls into the train station in Gdansk, Poland. On the train the police find a African male with most of his face shoot away. As the man was murdered in Ystad, the starting point of the train journey this becomes a case for Kurt Wallander and the Ystad police. For Kurt Wallander the case takes an unexpected turn as the murder weapon has ties to a childhood friend.

Kurt and his men tries to find the connection between a horrible murder taken place in Ystad and the kidnapping of the daugher of a memeber of the police force. It also seems someone has infiltrated the police and controls every move the police make.