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Puck has been invited by her tutor at the university to celebrate midsummer at his secluded cottage on an island together with a group of friends, among them Einar Bure. Puck and Einar are having a secret relationship, and he is the reason she says yes to the invitation. Having been out on a romantic spree with Einar, Puck finds one of the female guests murdered. Einar contacts his friend Christer Wijk, but upon Christer's arrival, the dead body has disappeared. The contact with the outside world is broken when the island's only boat goes missing. They are trapped on the island - and someone among them is a killer...
Spring is in the air and Puck and Einar, as well as Christer Wijk are invited to a wedding in Skoga. The day before the wedding, the bride-to-be enters a flower-shop in order to inspect her bridal bouquet of lily of the valley, but suddenly vanishes without at trace. When she eventually turns up again, it is Christer who finds her. She lies dead outside her home with a bouquet of lily of the valley in her hand. Everybody close to the bride are suspects, not least her best friend, whom Christer has just begun flirting with. Everybody seems to have something to hide. Question is: are their secrets connected to the murder?
Puck and Einar decide to spend the last weeks of their vacation in Einar's idyllic childhood town Skoga. Pucks father Johannes Ekstedt, professor in Egyptology, has a household cat called Thotmes III that joins the couple. They get to borrow both Einar's sisters beautiful old wooden house as well as her highly competent housekeeper. But after the first night, the idyll crumbles. Einar finds a dead body on the lawn, a young man stabbed to death by a dagger. Christer Wijk enters the stage and with the help of Pucks observations the mystery approaches its tragic solution.
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.
