Sweden is gripped by a wave of suicides: in different corners of the country, teenagers kill themselves using the most horrifying methods. The common denominator in these cases is old cassette players with recordings of music that makes even the police uneasy—and whose author is someone called Gholod. Soon, Jens Hourtig, who is leading the investigation, realizes that the suicides are in some unclear way connected to a string of murders of influential people. And this connection is much more terrifying than anyone could imagine. Music, paintings, suppressed desires and throttled hatred, childhood psychological wounds, revenge, God and the absence of God, an insatiable thirst to live and to die—all of it is woven into a tangled ball that the novel’s characters try to unravel, each in their own way.