Piet Hoffman, a top-secret operative for the Swedish police, faces his most dangerous assignment yet: after years spent infiltrating the Polish mafia, he's become a key player in their attempt to take over amphetamine distribution inside Sweden's prisons. To stop them from succeeding, he will have to go undercover, posing as a prisoner inside the country's most notorious jail.

But when a botched drug deal involving Hoffman results in the death of another cop, the murder investigation is assigned to the brilliant but haunted Detective Inspector Ewert Grens--a man who never gives up until he's cracked the case. Grens's determination to find the killer not only threatens to expose Hoffman's true identity, it may reveal even bigger crimes at the heart of the Swedish justice system. And there are players who will do anything to stop Grens from discovering the truth.

Winner of the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' 2009 award for Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year and a New York Times bestseller in the United States, Three Seconds captures a nefarious world of betrayal and violence, where a wise man trusts no one and even the most valuable agent can be "burned.”