On Midsummer's Eve, three roll-playing teens dressed in eighteenth-century garb are shot in a secluded Swedish meadow. When one of Inspector Wallander's most trusted colleagues -- someone whose help he hoped to rely on to solve the crime -- also turns up dead, Wallander knows the murders are related. But with his only clue a picture of a woman no one in Sweden seems to know, he can't begin to imagine how. Meanwhile, Wallander's father has recently died and he himself has been diagnosed with diabetes and finds himself constantly fatigued, even though he's just returned from summer vacation.