In 1992, in peaceful Southern Sweden, a young housewife, pillar of the Methodist church, disappears and is found murdered, execution style, and Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team are called in to investigate. But the chain of events leading to the murder began far away in South African, where Nelson Mandela has made his long walk to freedom, beginning South Africa's painful journey towards the end of Apartheid. The team find themselves caught up in a complex web involving renegade members of the South African secret service and a ruthless ex-KGB agent, all determined to halt Nelson Mandela's rise to power. Faced with an increasingly globalised world in which international terrorism knows no national borders, Wallander and his South African colleagues must prevent a crime that would change the face of history.