A teenage suicide. A murdered pharmacist. A missing girl. Is the obvious connection the right one?

When a boy leaps to his death from a bridge in the northern town of Umeå, Sweden, police discover drugs scattered in the snow near his body. The town has seen a dramatic increase in narcotic use among its youth, but nobody knows where the pills are coming from.

Relocating from Stockholm with her teenage daughter, Detective Charlotte von Klint expected Umeå to be a quiet backwater, a snow-covered change of pace from fighting the criminal underworld of the capital. But when a pharmacist is found brutally murdered in her apartment, and a young girl and her dealer boyfriend vanish without a trace after a party, suddenly Umeå doesn't seem so benign. And the boy on the bridge doesn't feel like an isolated incident.

Is the dealer the perpetrator? Or just another victim? And can it be a coincidence that a shadow from Charlotte's past, Syndicates boss Tony Israelsson, has recently been released from prison and is reportedly headed for Umeå?

As the snow deepens and the body count rises, Charlotte and her boss, local cop Per Berg, find themselves in a deadly pursuit, with time rapidly running out.