When a young girl on a woodland hike stumbles upon a corpse with no hands, feet, or head, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, recovering from surgery in a nearby hospital, begins to piece together the clues in the case.

A young girl is found dead in the forest, brutally raped and strangled, near the summer camp of a secretive religious sect. Van Veeteren and the other detectives on the case are angered and mystified by the sect's leader, Oscar Yellineck, a charismatic yet guarded messiah figure. Meanwhile, an unidentified woman offers to help. Her knowledge suggests she's more than a passing good Samaritan, and her tips become doubly perplexing as a string of horrifying...

In the middle of the night, a boy is struck by a car after leaving his girlfriend's house. The driver, drunk, leaves the boy's body by the side of the road and, wrestling with guilt, tries to put it all out of his mind, until a blackmail note arrives. In the meantime, Reinhart, the new chief inspector of the Maardam police force, has set his team to work. But a second, possibly related killing proves that this is no ordinary case. The police, desperate...