When a pillar of the local community vanishes, Inspector Kurt Wallander has a feeling the victim will never be found alive, but he has no idea how far he will have to go in search of the killer...

In 1992, in peaceful Southern Sweden, a young housewife, a pillar of the Methodist church, disappears and Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team are called in to investigate.

But he soon discovers that the chain of events leading to her disappearance began far away in South African, where Nelson Mandela has made his long walk to freedom, setting in train South Africa's painful journey towards the end of Apartheid. Wallander's 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.