A winner of three Swedish Crime Writers' Academy Best Novel Prizes and the Crime Writers of Scandinavia's prestigious Glass Key Award, H?kan Nesser "has a penetrating eye for the skull beneath the skin" (NYTBR). We are pleased to offer these early mysteries in Nesser's classic Inspector Van Veeteren series.

Overdue for a vacation, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is instead embroiled in a case—his fifth, after Woman with Birthmark—when a girl who belongs to the secretive religious sect Pure Life is found dead in the forest. Led by a charismatic messiah figure, the cult members choose to remain silent about the incident. But an unidentified woman is assisting the authorities, and her tips become doubly perplexing as a new string of increasingly horrifying crimes defy everything Van Veeteren and his team thought they knew about the case.