Crimes of Passion: The Maria Lang Collection

Puck Ekstedt, doctoral student in literature, is invited by her supervisor Rutger to spend Midsummer with him and his wife at their summer house on an isolated island. When he reveals that the young historian Einar Bure will be there too, Puck gladly accepts. When she arrives to the Midsummer party on the island, she finds a bunch of young people, whose lives are entwined since their student days. She quickly notices a web of tensions between them, both erotic and distressing. These tensions grow, when Rutger's former fiance Marianne Wallman unexpectedly turns up with her girlfriend Viveka Stensson. Next morning Puck stumbles upon Marianne's dead body in the wood. Puck and Einar go with the motor boat across the lake to call for Einar's friend Christer Wijk, chief of the national homicide investigation team. When Christer arrives to the island, the boat's motor breaks down. There is no other boat, and no telephone, so now all of them are isolated together on the island. The murderer must be one of the Midsummer celebrators, because there is no one else here. Christer's suspicions are focused on Georg Malm, a former lover to Marianne, but the next day he is found murdered as well.

Einar Bure and his fiancée Puck Ekstedt are invited to a wedding in the small town of Skoga. Outside the church they meet Christer Wijk, chief of the national homicide investigation team, with his mother Helena, who invites them to stay in her house for a couple of days. Suddenly the bridegroom, Joakim Kruse, appears and informs the wedding guests that his bride, Anneli Hassel, hasn't arrived, which means that the wedding is canceled. Early next morning Christer and Puck stumble upon the dead body of the bride, lying at a lawn. They start investigating the murder, and soon find out that a lot of people are lying. All of them are surely not involved in the homicide, but are trying to hide other secrets that could cause disgrace in the small town. All evidences in the case seem to point at a recluse, Mats Norrgård, who is found hanging dead at his cottage in the wood, but Christer and Puck are quite sure that he isn't the murder. Meantime Einar and Puck are planning their own wedding. When Puck doesn't turn up at a preparatory meeting with the priest, because she is too engaged in the murder mystery, Einar believes that she doesn't love him anymore.

Newlywed Eje and Puck Bure arrive to Skoga for a three-week holiday. The next morning they find the dead body of a young man in their garden. Soon Christer Wijk, chief of the national homicide investigation team, turns up. He takes over the investigation from the local police, because there is a connection between this murdered man, Tommy Holt, and another case, the recently murdered Britt Andersson in Sundbyberg. Christer and Puck start interrogating the neighbors, but everyone denies that they know anything about Tommy and his return to Skoga. After a while the deafening silence starts to crack. Many of the neighbors met Tommy the day he was murdered. Some had a quarrel with him, and some of them had a peculiar relationship with him since many years. Tommy's father, Colonel Holt, admits that Tommy was born out of wedlock. The real mother was Britt Andersson, although he and his wife, Margit Holt, have pretended that both of them were his biological parents. Suddenly someone tries to kill also the well known author Elisabet Mattson, who lives in a house nearby. Christer and Puck have hard to relate this new turn to the murder of Tommy Holt.

The country estate of Rödbergshyttan is surrounded by heavily fragrant roses in every color. There lives the beautiful Gabriella, who Christer loves, and an invitation to their engagement party is the reason for Puck and Einar to travel there. But the rose-scented idyll soon turn into a stifling background when Puck finds Gabriella's grandfather poisoned in his bed. Little by little we learn that the relations between the people living at the estate is everything but uncomplicated, and that there is a sexual frustration behind every well polished marriage. The question is to what extent beautiful Gabriella is involved in the intrigues and how much of a coincidence it is that her grandfather is killed just when Christer is in the house.

Puck has managed to get a job working for the eccentric Nobel Literature Prize laureate Andreas Hallman. Hallman is charming and genial, but also a neurotic tyrant. He forces his wife, his three grown children and a daughter-in-law to live in seclusion together, separated from the rest of the world. One night, after the daughter-in-law's birthday dinner, Hallman's eldest and favourite son dies. The question is whether the son, who was frail and sickly, died of natural causes or not.

It's Christmas Eve, and the vicarage there is a sumptuous Christmas table waiting for the vicar and his guests, Puck and Bure and professor Einar Ekstedt. Then there's a knock on the door, the beautiful Barbara Sandell announced that her husband has disappeared. He was murdered in his own country store and suddenly, the rectory and the people are full of policemen, photographers and forensic orders Christer Wijk experts. Tears and old wounds appear, while the mystery surrounding crimes. Everything becomes a quiet Christmas that people will never forget. Based on the novel by Maria Lang.