A woman is found murdered in the middle of Oresund Bridge, exactly on the border between Sweden and Denmark. Saga Noren from Malmo CID and Martin Rohde from the Copenhagen police department are called to the scene. What at first looks like one murder turns out to be two. The bodies have been brutally cut off at the waist and joined together - the torso of a high-profile Swedish politician and the lower body of a Danish prostitute. The Swedish and Danish police need to cooperate in a race against the clock, desperately searching for a murderer determined to go beyond all moral limits to get his message across.
The murderer makes his presence known and chooses sharp-witted tabloid journalist Daniel Ferbe to act as middle man to communicate with the outside world. The murder on the bridge was only the beginning, and the purpose of that heinous act was to draw attention to the unpleasant truths and problems in society that most turn a blind eye to, the first one being that 'we are not all equal before the law'. Saga and Martin now realise they are dealing with a ruthless killer.
In Copenhagen, several homeless people have been poisoned. The perpetrator wants to draw attention to the problem of the increased number of people falling through the cracks of society. A homeless man is kidnapped and the only thing that can stop the murderer from killing him is a large sum of money from four landlords. So what is the price of a human being after all?
The homeless man's survival becomes a race against time and depends completely on the four landlords' willingness to pay what the murderer demands. Saga and Martin have understood that they are dealing with someone who has really thought through his crimes, planning them down to the smallest detail. They wonder if they can catch the murderer off balance by doing something he doesn't expect.
The murderer has groomed a number of schizophrenic people over a long period of time, convincing them to commit carefully synchronised violent crimes in Malmo and Copenhagen on the same day. With the third truth, the murderer wants to highlight the cutbacks within mental health care, which has been reduced to 'a pat on the back and a jar of pills'. Saga and Martin manage to find a break in the case, a teenage girl who has run away from home. Could she be the witness that ultimately leads them to the murderer?
Copenhagen is up in arms following a court case in which a group of police officers who beat an immigrant to death are found innocent. One of the accused officers is kidnapped from his home and is found by thedead immigrant's brother, chained up in his basement. Will he forgive or take revenge on his brother's killer? Here, the murderer wants to draw attention to the fourth truth, namely the failure of the state's integration policy. For the first time Saga and the killer are in contact with each other.
The murderer's fifth and final truth is the public's indifference to child labour, with millions of children being exploited daily in order to produce goods as cheaply as possible. Since they are not our ownchildren we don't care, but when a school bus full of children disappears, suddenly we sit up and take notice. To save the children, the murderer demands that five large companies which benefit indirectly from child labour should be set on fire by the general public. Saga increasingly suspects that the perpetrator is one of their own - a police officer.
After many suspicions and one witness statement, Saga and Martin arrest and question a fellow officer. He turns out to have an alibi for all the crimes, but is he really innocent? The murderer is finished now,having succeeded in doing what he set out to do - to open people's eyes to the problems of society. Saga, however, believes that this is not the end of his plan and that there is more to come.
Gradually all the pieces to the complicated puzzle are put in place. The clues and evidence in the investigation have led the police to a man who could be the murderer. Now they wait tensely for his next move.
It now dawns on the police that the final step in the murderer's evil plan has a new direction. Saga does all she can to crack the case and catch the killer - will she succeed before it's too late?
