On a winter day, during an everyday walk in the forest, a retired man—once a high-ranking naval officer, Håkan von Enke—disappears without a trace, followed by his wife. For sixty-year-old police commissioner Kurt Wallander, this case becomes personal as well: the missing are his daughter Linda’s father-in-law and mother-in-law—her little daughter’s grandfather and grandmother. Tangled threads, it seems, lead back into the past, to the era of the Cold War. It looks as though the restless commissioner has come close to a spy secret. Meanwhile, an unexpected danger is closing in on him.