Kenneth Branagh stars as "the Norse Morse," Inspector Kurt Wallander, the scruffy Swedish sleuth created by best-selling author Henning Mankell. In three whodunits, Mankell pits his hero against the creeping malaise affecting contemporary Sweden, where permissiveness and the collapse of the welfare state are slowly undermining the spirit of law and order. A maelstrom of bizarre crimes, involving axe murders, scalpings, random assassinations and cyber-terrorism, taxes Wallander's wits. An unknown young woman sets herself on fire in a field, leading to a search for her identity. Could her suicide be connected to a string of grisly ax murders that are felling members of Swedish high society? And why is the killer scalping the victims? Ominously, a profiler tells Wallander that he should be looking for someone who seems completely normal.
