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An elderly retired warehouseman, Karl Edvin Svärd, is found shot dead in his Stockholm flat weeks after his death, with the door locked and bolted from inside and no weapon present. Martin Beck works out that he was hit by a shot fired through his open window from outside.
While a showy special squad chases a professional bank-robbery gang, the robbery in which a customer died was actually committed by Monita, a young divorced single mother driven to it by money pressure and dead-end work. The police build their case against a career criminal instead, and he is convicted of that robbery.
The novel argues that a prosperous social-democratic state can supply housing and pensions while leaving people so atomised that a man can lie dead in his flat for weeks before anyone notices. Material provision without community produces fearful, isolated citizens. The same pressures that isolate them can push them toward crime.
Watch whom police effort is organised around: here an ambitious prosecutor's special squad pours manpower into dramatic ambushes and headline arrests of professional robbers. Meanwhile the unglamorous case of a dead pensioner is filed away and gets only a convalescent detective's patient attention. The lens reveals that police priorities follow careers, publicity and the state's self-image rather than the harm done to ordinary people.