A boy in a dark duffel coat. Lying in the ditch. Contorted at impossible angles, with his back pressed up against a concrete culvert and his face staring straight at him. As if he were trying to make some kind of contact. As if he wanted to tell him something.

In the middle of a damp, dark night, a young man is struck by a car after leaving his girlfriend's house. The driver, drunk, leaves the body by the side of the road. Wrestling with guilt, the driver tries to put the murder out of his mind-until a blackmail note arrives, setting into motion a chain of events that will draw everyone involved into a fog of crime.

Reinhart, the new chief inspector of the Maardam police force, sets his team to work. But when the victim of a second, possibly related, killing is identified, Reinhart realizes that this is no ordinary investigation. In Hour of the Wolf, former chief inspector Van Veeteren-a legend now in retirement-is called upon to face his greatest trial yet, when someone close to him is found dead.

Van Veeteren's former colleagues, desperate for answers, struggle to decipher the clues to these appalling crimes. As the killer becomes increasingly unhinged and unpredictable, Van Veeteren is forced to reenter a world he left behind, and to avenge a death. Told with Håkan Nesser's trademark eye for detail, breakneck plotting, and gut-wrenching moral tension, Hour of the Wolf finds the Nordic noir superstar spinning one of his darkest tales yet.