The Dogs of Riga

Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team at the Ystad police station in Skane, southern Sweden, receive an anonymous tip-off that comes to pass a few days later: a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead. The dead men were Eastern European criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But the case soon takes on a far more sinister aspect. Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea to Riga in Latvia, a nation experiencing the massive social and political upheaval that will lead to its independence from the Soviet Union. There he is plunged into a frozen, alien world of police surveillance, scarcely veiled threats and lies. Only his dogged, almost subconscious desire to see justice done brings the truth to light.