Life isn't easy for the indecisive 40-year-old Claes-Henrik. Should he choose his mom or his girlfriend?

In a playground in the centre of the urban idyll, the police find a buried wooden box containing a famous and well-respected prosecutor. Martin Beck and his police team initially suspect a highly criminal MC-leader of the attack, but one pretty soon has to re-evaluate the case once the MC-leader is found murdered in a similar wooden box. Soon, more wooden boxes are found and the police realize that they are part of a cat and mouse game with a crazy serial killer. The investigation soon shows that there is a vague connection between the victims in the shape of a 9 year old event, but what Martin Beck does not suspect is that his own life too is at stake, as the murderer has chosen him as the next victim.

A small girl is found dead in a deserted underground cellar. She has been dead for some time but there is fresh food for her. Who is she?

A paparazzi photographer gets brutally murdered in Stockholm. His apartment is searched and the computer together with photo equipment is missing.

Martin Beck, Gunvald Larsson and Alice Levander investigate the mysterious murder of an accountant that was found shot to death at the airport parking. At the same time a reporter receives a package from an anonymous source, with information regarding the embezzling of funds that should have been used for fixing up nuclear reactors. When the reporter contacts Beck, his home gets blown up by a bomb.

McMurphy pretends to be mad to avoid a prison sentence but existence in the mental hospital is not what he imagined.

Swedish politician John Veden vanishes without a trace. There's no hint he's dead yet but Beck's team gets the case due to Police Chief Oberg's friendship with the man whom she dined with him the evening before he vanished. When they find out Veden was a gambler with heavy debts battling his addiction the case leads Martin Beck, Gunvald Larsson and freshly returned Lena Klingström into Sweden's illegal gambling scene. And Veden was planning to expose his own addiction and his party's huge financial profits from gambling in a confessional book - which his political allies got wind of via illegal data theft. With several people having an interest that Veden stays missing the team tries to find the politician and the true perpetrator while Beck is grappling privately with his ambivalent feelings about working with ex Lena again....

An abused woman is feverishly sought by police in the murder of her ex-husband but is being hidden by abused woman-advocates. At the same time, Gunvald Larsson discovers a police report that his long-estranged sister has been abused. He confronts her with his knowledge but she denies it.

Two patrolling cops stumble on to three criminals who have just stolen large amounts of explosives, and are killed in cold blood. Martin Beck and his team must now work day and night to find out who the killers are and what they are planning to do with the explosives before it's too late. Meanwhile, Gunvald Larsson who was a close friend of one of the murdered cops is ignoring all rules in his quest for revenge.

In this film Beck and his team are trying to find a serial killer, whose victims are spread all over Sweden. An obvious connection is that all the victims are women, and they were all in the same class, and Beck thinks that a scandal back in the past has something to do with the murders. But no one wants to talk about the past and it becomes a struggle to find the perpetrator before the final murder - only one woman is still alive.