Ernst Grip, a royal bodyguard and Swedish secret service agent, is summoned to New York by the FBI, then taken to a remote island in the Indian Ocean to interrogate a prisoner whose nationality is unclear. The prisoner is believed to be a Swedish national involved in an Islamic terrorist attack in Kansas, but since he won't speak at all, it seems impossible to identify him. The person Grip meets is practically a ghost: all that's left of a man who has undergone unthinkable torture. Little by little, however, the man begins to open up, and Grip finds himself drawn into an  investigation that can be traced back to mysterious events in Thailand right after the 2004 tsunami and ranges from a series of art heists to the intrigues of a ruthless American arms dealer and the darkest recesses of international terrorism. In no time Grip realizes that the case is much more complicated than it appears, and also that a part of his own life that he has always kept under wraps is a piece of the investigative puzzle as well.

Robert Karjel, former fighter pilot, is a lieutenant colonel in the Swedish Air Force and commands a helicopter division. After studying at the elite Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, where he obtained a degree in applied physics, Karjet attended Amherst College in Massachusetts in 2005. He is the only Swedish pilot who has trained with the U.S. Marine Corps. In 2010 he commanded a naval air unit on the warship HSwMS Carlskrona in the Gulf of Aden, where he tangled with Somali pirates and took part in military operations in the Yemen region. He has appeared in the BBC documentary The Trouble with Pirates, devoted to the Operation Atalanta. To research his novels he has traveled to the Libyan desert, the lairs of drug traffickers in the Amazon, and the Vatican Library. Thanks to The Swede, Karjel signed a million-dollar contract with publishing behemoth HarperCollins which also entails the publication of a sequel. 20th Century Fox and Yellow Bird Entertainment - producers of the Stieg Larsson trilogy - have jointed purchased the rights for a television series planned for 2015.