Newlywed Eje and Puck Bure arrive to Skoga for a three-week holiday. The next morning they find the dead body of a young man in their garden. Soon Christer Wijk, chief of the national homicide investigation team, turns up. He takes over the investigation from the local police, because there is a connection between this murdered man, Tommy Holt, and another case, the recently murdered Britt Andersson in Sundbyberg. Christer and Puck start interrogating the neighbors, but everyone denies that they know anything about Tommy and his return to Skoga. After a while the deafening silence starts to crack. Many of the neighbors met Tommy the day he was murdered. Some had a quarrel with him, and some of them had a peculiar relationship with him since many years. Tommy’s father, Colonel Holt, admits that Tommy was born out of wedlock. The real mother was Britt Andersson, although he and his wife, Margit Holt, have pretended that both of them were his biological parents. Suddenly someone tries to kill also the well known author Elisabet Mattson, who lives in a house nearby. Christer and Puck have hard to relate this new turn to the murder of Tommy Holt.