It's autumn in Gothenburg and an anxious mother calls the police; her little boy was lured into a car by a man offering sweets. The child is returned unharmed but then the same thing happens with a little girl, and then another. Each child attends a different nursery, and each parent contacts a different police station, so, at first, no connection is established between the incidents and the reports are filed and forgotten. Meanwhile DCI Winter is investigating a series of random attacks on strangely uncooperative university students, but when a four-year-old boy is abducted and found injured, the forgotten files resurface and a link between the stories becomes apparent. As Gothenburg prepares for Christmas, Winter is in a race against time to prevent a horrific catastrophe.

A couple entertain a stranger in their Gothenburg apartment, but his choice of death metal music isn't quite what they had in mind - this particular illicit rendezvous will be prove to be their last. For more than a week a newspaper boy has watched his deliveries piling up behind a front door. The loud music playing inside the apartment seems an odd choice for 5 a.m. and the boy becomes increasingly afraid. What greets Chief Inspector Erik Winter and his team when they arrive appears as a stage setting, grotesquely symbolic in its composition. While Inspector Winter trawls the classifieds in men's magazines in search of the missing third person from this sinister party, a trail from the clues left by the killer leads into the cult world of the gothic. A riddle of nightmares, of good ve