When a body is found on Oresund Bridge, between Sweden and Denmark, Saga Noren from Malmo and Martin Rohde from Copenhagen will begin a race-against-time hunt for a sadistic killer waging a trail of violence that will change both detectives forever.
The chair of the Malmo city council is found dead right on the Danish-Swedish border on the Øresund bridge between Copenhagen and Malmo - the corpse cut in half at the waistline. Detective Saga Norén of Malmo CID is applied to the case and soon learns that the lower half of the corpse belongs to a yet unknown Danish woman. She is forced to team up with her Danish colleague Martin Rohde, who is slightly irritated by her unusual manners. At the same time, Göran Söringer is brought to Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet to receive a heart transplant.
The bomb in Daniel Ferbé's car did not go off. Instead, the car's CD player put out a disc that contains a message from the murderer, which is also published on a website. He deplores five grievances of society, the first of which shall be highlighted by the murders. Norén traces back the website of the murderer to a server of the Danish CID and Rohde reopens the case of the second victim, a Danish prostitute who disappeared more than a year ago, and obtains her diary. Eventually Charlotte Söringer manages to get her beloved husband his heart transplant.
To draw attention to the increased number of people falling through the cracks of society, the killer kidnaps a homeless man and demands a large ransom from four landlords for his survival. So what is the price of a human being after all?
Knowing the killer has carefully planned his crimes, Saga and Martin wonder whether they can catch him off guard by doing something he doesn't expect.
The murderer has groomed a number of schizophrenics to commit carefully synchronized violent crimes on the same day in Malmo and Copenhagen.
A rogue policeman is killed by someone in uniform. The detectives believe that the killer for whom they are searching was the killer. They also now suspect that the killer may indeed be one of them - that he is actually is a cop.
A bus-load of children is kidnapped and are threatened to be killed. The police believe that the kidnapper is the killer, and the hunt continues.
Because the detectives suspect that a policeman is involved, a profile of the killer is developed and several police fit the profile and a search among them begins. The hunt continues and a particular suspect is found.
Things are brought closer to home when the criminal's mask is removed.
The crime spree is resolved. However, many loose threads remain.