A young man falls to his death from a window in a student dorm in Stockholm, his loose shoe striking and killing the little dog being taken for his evening walk by an old man. It seems to be a mundane suicide--at least that's what the police choose to think. But the young man is American, not Swedish, and there are a couple of odd things about his room when they search it ... From these tiny beginnings, Leif GW Persson slowly begins to unravel a puzzle that gets larger and larger as it becomes more andmore complex, until it sweeps us into a web of international espionage, backroom politics, greed, sheer incompetence, and the shoddy work of Sweden's intelligence force that leads to the murder of the prime minister.