Following an earthquake, the water level of an Icelandic lake suddenly falls to reveal a skeleton half-buried in its sandy bed. It has clearly been there many years. There is a large hole in the skull. Yet more mysteriously, it is weighted down by a heavy radio transmitter bearing inscriptions in Russian. The police are called in.

Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson investigates the killing of a solitary man, found murdered in his Reykjavík apartment, and discovers that the dead man had been accused but not convicted of a rape forty years earlier.

Shetland Detective Jimmy Perez knows it will be a difficult homecoming when he returns to the Fair Isles to introduce his fiancee, Fran, to his parents. It’s a community where everyone knows each other, and strangers, while welcomed, are still viewed with a degree of mistrust.

While probing the brutal murder of one of the owners of Dakar, a fancy restaurant, detective Ann Lindell discovers that her suspects include his partner in the establishment, as well as everyone else who works there.

Detective Frank Mackey finds himself straight back in the dark tangle of relationships he left behind twenty-two years ago when the suitcase belonging to his first love, Rosie Daly, shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place.

Ruth and Simon Pierce’s rare romantic break is shattered by devastating news: their daughter, Heather, on holiday in Cornwall with a friend’s family, has disappeared. The loss is more than they or their marriage can bear. But time does heal and slowly Ruth builds a new life for herself with a new husband, Andrew – even a second daughter, Beatrice.

After she returns to her hometown to learn that her friend, Alex, was found in an ice-cold bath with her wrists slashed, biographer Erica Falck researches her friend’s past in hopes of writing a book and joins forces with Detective Patrik Hedstrom, who has his own suspicions about the case.

Inspector Kurt Wallander, a local Swedish police officer whose own personal life is falling apart, finds himself coping with a wave of anti-foreigner sentiment when he is put in charge of the investigation into the brutal murders of an elderly couple.

Hudiksvall, January 2006, police find eighteen people massacred in a small village. They think it’s the work of a mad man but Birgitta and August believe they were killed by the same person who killed their mother.

A tale moving from the final months of World War II to the present, and from the Russian front to contemporary South Africa, follows the dual adventures of a freedom-seeking war martyr and an alcoholic police officer who is drawn into a mystery with past origins.

Twenty years after Jens disappeared without a trace from the island of Oland, a package is mailed to the boy’s grandfather that contains the worn and mended shoe of a child, prompting the grandfather to contact the child’s mother, resume the hunt for the boy, and make a shocking connection between Jens’s disappearance and the island’s most notorious murder case.