A heat wave is smothering the Swedish coastal city of Gothenburg. School is out, and parks and beaches are teeming with people. But a spate of unsolved rape/murders casts a disturbing shadow on this particular summer. Chief Inspector Erik Winter, now forty-one and a father, assembles the scant but grisly details of the crimes, and begins to see an eerie connection to a five-year-old unsolved rape/murder, a case he, in typically obsessive fashion, has refused to let go cold. Has the same rapist reemerged to taunt the police and flaunt his stolen freedom, or are these copycat crimes?