Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team at the Ystad police station in Sk??ne, southern Sweden, receive an anonymous tip-off that comes to pass a few days later a life raft is washed up on a beach In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead The dead men were Eastern European criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit But as the case soon takes on a sinister turn, Wallander finds himself in Riga, Latvia There he is plunged into a frozen, alien world of police surveillance, scarcely veiled threats and lies