Meet police superintendent Malin Fors: Talented. Troubled. With a sixth sense for the truth. In the early hours of one of the coldest February nights anyone in Linköping, Sweden, can remember, the bloody body of an obese man, stripped bare and horribly mutilated, is found hanging from a lone oak tree in the middle of a snow-covered, windswept plain not far from town. Malin Fors is assigned to the case. Thirty-four years old, blond, single, and divorced with a teenage daughter, Malin has taken a violent and hazardous path in life. And now, together with her colleagues, she must follow in the frigid wake of a killer who has just begun his work. It is a manhunt that will take Malin into the darkest corners of the human heart, where the sins of the past—hidden away—all too often wreak havoc from one generation to the next.