Grieving from the recent death of his father, the sudden collapse of his career and the arrival of an unsurmountable government debt, George English, an American living in Sweden stumbles onto an unlikely situation - a chance for a 50 million Swedish Crown reward for solving the 30-year-old murder of the former prime minister, Olof Palme. Naturally, George begins to imagine that cracking the Palme case could be the answer to all his problems.