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. Two teenage girls murder a taxi driver in a senseless robbery. A computer systems analyst drops dead for no apparent reason. The local power grid is on the blink. And Wallander can't find time for a new love interest, discovered on the Internet. These disparate strands gradually weave a fiendish plot with a gripping countdown to an impending disaster.
