The chair of the Malmo city council is found dead right on the Danish-Swedish border on the Øresund bridge between Copenhagen and Malmo - the corpse cut in half at the waistline. Detective Saga Norén of Malmo CID is applied to the case and soon learns that the lower half of the corpse belongs to a yet unknown Danish woman. She is forced to team up with her Danish colleague Martin Rohde, who is slightly irritated by her unusual manners. At the same time, Göran Söringer is brought to Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet to receive a heart transplant.

The bomb in Daniel Ferbé's car did not go off. Instead, the car's CD player put out a disc that contains a message from the murderer, which is also published on a website. He deplores five grievances of society, the first of which shall be highlighted by the murders. Norén traces back the website of the murderer to a server of the Danish CID and Rohde reopens the case of the second victim, a Danish prostitute who disappeared more than a year ago, and obtains her diary. Eventually Charlotte Söringer manages to get her beloved husband his heart transplant.