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 horse breeder is found dead, and almost everything indicates that he has been kicked by his horse. But the post-mortem shows the opposite, the horse breeder had been hit to death and that's a case for Kurt Wallander. The neighbors confirm that he lived alone, but he had visits from a mysterious woman several times. Surprising evidence on the farm shows a whole new side of the horse breeder and somewhere, in the beautiful state of Skåne, there's a dark world that doesn't want to see the daylight.

Isabelle and Pontus pass out as police officers but he is dismayed when she says she wants to put their affair on hold in order to travel.Her plans are cut short when she joins the investigation into the death of her friend from the gym,Therese,murdered by burglars. Therese's loser ex-boyfriend Fabian is in debt to very heavy people and offers them her jewels but is he the killer? Violent boxer and ex-con Patrik Lippowski,a former lover of Isabelle,who fled from him and changed her name from Rebecka to Isabelle to escape him,is another suspect,but he is murdered with Isabelle's gun. In finding the killer Pontus's love for Isabelle is put to the test whilst Wallander advises Katarina when her bitchy teen-aged daughter starts stealing.

Kurt returns to work after a temporarly suspention. At the same time a girl disappeares which draws in the entire Ystad police and military looking frantically for her. When Kurt starts to work on the case, he begins to see similarities to a case he worked on ten years earlier, which hit him very personally.

A young woman arrives at the Ystad police station to report her mother missing. Soon afterward the mother is found near the family home. Ystad police end up in a situation that constantly stirs up new topics, while police suspect that the father is the culprit. On a personal level Martinsson becomes increasingly worried about Kurt as he is starting to get more and more problems with his memory.