✍ Scribed by Nesser, Hakan
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The highly anticipated first novel in the Inspector Van Veeteren series in now available in English. At last, American readers will be able to enjoy, from its very beginnings, this addictive series by one of Europe’s most beloved and best-selling crime writers.
Chief Inspector Van Veeteren knew that murder cases were never as open-and-shut as this one: Janek Mitter woke one morning with a brutal hangover and discovered his wife of three months lying facedown in the bathtub, dead. With only the flimsiest excuse as his defense, he is found guilty of a drunken crime of passion and imprisoned in a mental institution.
But Van Veeteren’s suspicions about the identity of the killer are borne out when Mitter also becomes a murder victim. Now the chief inspector launches a full-scale investigation of the two slayings. But it may only be the unspoken secrets of the dead–revealed in a mysterious letter that Mitter wrote shortly before his death–that will finally allow Van Veeteren to unmask the killer and expose the shocking root of this sordid violence.
When foreign crime novelists break through in the U.S., it’s often not with the first book in a series; then, riding on success, the earlier volumes are issued. So it was with Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander series, and so it is now with Wallander’s fellow Swede Hakan Nesser. This third Inspector Van Veeteren novel to appear here is actually the first in the series. The similarities, apparent in Nesser’s Borkmann’s Point (2006), between Van Veeteren’s intuitive sleuthing style and that of Commissaire Adamsberg in Fred Vargas’ series, are even more evident here, as the inspector attempts to rely on his ability to sense guilt and innocence in a suspect. This time, though, Van Veeteren’s sense that Janek Mitter didn’t kill his wife doesn’t keep the man out of prison; the inspector only knows he was right when Mitter is murdered on the day he is released. Effectively combining police procedural and psychological thriller, Nesser lets us into the heads of both his hero and the people he investigates. Backtracking in a series is sometimes disconcerting, as it can be here, but it’s easy to see how this book launched Nesser’s career. --Bill Ott
Praise for _Borkmann’s Point
_
“Nesser had a penetrating eye for the skull beneath the skin.”
–*The New York Times
_“Keeps you on the edge of your seat… You don’t want it to end.”
–_San Francisco Chronicle
_“Inspector Van Veeteren seems destined for a place amongst the great European detectives.”
–_Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse mysteries
Praise for The Return
_“A blast… His plots are addictive, his writing admirably economical, his characters complex and engaging.”
_ –Richmond Times-Dispatch
_“Another solid example of why Swedes have become the talk of crime fiction.”
_ –Booklist
_“Every bit as enjoyably creepy as his previous offering… For anyone looking for something new in a mystery or detective series.”
–_Entertainment World
*
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