A riveting detective novel from the internationally acclaimed author Håkan Nesser in which Detective Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is summoned to Kaalbringen, a quiet European town by the sea, to track down the link between a series of murders.An ex-con is brutally murdered with an axe in the unusually quiet town of Kaalbringen. And then the body of a wealthy real estate mogul is found, also violently attacked. With what appears to be a serial killer on the loose, Detective Chief In...

The author of Borkmann’s Point spins a story that leaves even the most veteran crime novel readers chilled.A new case for Chief Inspector Van Veeteren – the complicated history of a nearly perfect murder. On a sunny August day a man is released from prison. On a rainy April day children at play find his corpse. The fact that the dead man is Leopold Verhaven only becomes clear after some time because the mutilated corpse is without its head, legs and feet. Who would...

Now don't start getting ideas. I am not a philosopher. I'm a dog. But I look like a philosopher, they say, and I'm not sure the distinction is as great as you might think. I'm what's known as a Rhodesian Ridgeback. My forebears used to hunt lions in Africa, but I'm a modernized urban specimen. I don't hunt much of anything.I was born somewhere on the plains west of Uppsala, Sweden. In the beginning I was blind and tumbled around with my siblings. We pooped and bit each other and nu...

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 c...

The master of Swedish crime fiction returns with this award-winning latest entry into the Van Veeteren series. It starts with a drunk man killing a boy as he hits him with his car. Thinking no one has seen him, he feels he's off the hook. Until he receives a message telling him that the sender knows what he's done and unless he pays him ransom, to be left in a bag at a secluded men's room, he'll squeal. The killer does as instructed, but as he sees a young man leave with said bag, he then ...

While on a field trip through the woods on the outskirts of Behren, a young girl stumbles upon a decomposing body wrapped in a carpet and lying in a ditch. The body has no hands, feet, or head, but this was not the work of wild animals. A brutal killer is on the loose—but who is the victim?From the hospital bed where he is recovering from surgery, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren begins to piece together the fragmentary clues that involve a nun who hides a secret, a crippled woman, the...

A secretive and dubious religious sect comes under investigation as one of their young members, a girl on the cusp of puberty, is found dead in the forest, brutally raped and strangled. Adopting to remain silent over the incident rather than defend themselves, the members of The Pure Life-led by their intelligent but perturbing messiah figure, Oscar Yellineck-simultaneously anger and mystify Van Veeteren and the other detectives on the case. What’s more, the girl’s murder was tipped off by...

For Waldemar Leverkuhn, a retiree living with his wife in a small unit in an unassuming block of apartments, the day couldn’t begin more auspiciously. He, along with three friends, have won the lottery. It’s a modest but healthy sum of money and the old men toast to their good luck with a celebratory dinner at their usual haunt. The day ends, however, with Leverkuhn drunk, stumbling, belligerent, and eventually dead in his bed, stabbed twenty-eight times in the chest with a carving knife. ...

After hearing her mother’s deathbed confession and following the dreary funeral, Maria Adler realizes she has no other option but to seize upon her mother’s imperative to do something. Dissolving the life she loathes, Maria changes her appearance and disappears. When she emerges, revenge is her sole occupation.Inspector Van Veeteren and his associates are left bewildered by the curious murder of a man shot twice in the heart and twice below the belt. He was a quiet, utterly dull ma...

An ex-con is brutally murdered with an ax in Kaalbringen. Then the body of a wealthy real estate mogul is found, also the victim of a violent attack. There appears to be a serial killer on the loose, and Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is called in to help the local police. As details surrounding the grisly murders are collected, Van Veeteren finds little to go on. But then there’s another murder, and shortly thereafter one of Van Veeteren’s colleagues, a promising female detective, goes miss...

Eva is walking by the river one afternoon when a body floats to the surface of the icy water. She tells her daughter to wait patiently while she calls the police, but when she reaches the phone box Eva dials another number altogether.The dead man, Egil, has been missing for months, and it doesn't take long for Inspector Sejer and his team to establish that he was the victim of a very violent killer. But the trail has gone cold. It's as puzzling as another unsolved case on Sejer's d...

Gunder Jomann, a quiet, middle-aged man from a peaceful Norwegian community, thinks his life has been made complete when he returns from a trip to India a married man. But on the day his Indian bride is due to join him, he is called to the hospital to his sister's bedside. The local taxi driver sent instead to meet the bride at the airport returns without her. Then the town is shocked by the news of an Indian woman found bludgeoned to death in a nearby meadow.Inspector Sejer and hi...