On a winter day, during a daily walk in the forest, a pensioner, a former high-ranking naval officer, Hokan von Encke, disappears without a trace, followed by his wife. For sixty-year-old Police Commissioner Kurt Wallander, this case is also personal: the missing are his daughter Linda's father-in-law and mother-in-law, and her little daughter's grandparents. The tangled threads seem to lead back to the past, to the Cold War era. It seems that the restless commissioner has come close to a spy secret. Meanwhile, an unforeseen danger is approaching him.