International BestsellerHåkan Nesser is firmly established as one of the world's bestselling crime novelists. And now the novel that introduced Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is available for the first time in English.The swift conviction left Van Veeteren uneasy: Janek Mitter woke one morning with a brutal hangover and his wife dead in the bathtub. With only the flimsiest defense, he is found guilty and imprisoned in a mental institution. But when Mitter is ...

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...

International BestsellerChief Inspector Van Veeteren is forced to unlock the secrets of a nearly perfect murder in this taut psychological thriller.On a rainy April day, a body—or what is left of it—is found by a young girl. Wrapped in a blanket with no hands, feet, or head, it signals the work of a brutal, methodical killer. The victim, Leopold Verhaven, was a track star before he was convicted for killing two of his ex-lovers. He consistently proclaimed h...

International BestsellerInternationally bestselling author Häkan Nesser makes his U.S. debut with this riveting tale of murder and suspense that reveals the deep humanity of the characters portrayed even as it sends chills up the spine.Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is called to the sleepy coastal town of Kalbringen to assist the local police in the investigation of two recent ax murders. Soon the case turns from bad to worse when another body turns up and on...

A boy in a dark duffel coat. Lying in the ditch. Contorted at impossible angles, with his back pressed up against a concrete culvert and his face staring straight at him. As if he were trying to make some kind of contact. As if he wanted to tell him something.In the middle of a damp, dark night, a young man is struck by a car after leaving his girlfriend’s house. The driver, drunk, leaves the body by the side of the road. Wrestling with guilt, the driver tries to put the murder out...

International BestsellerChief Inspector Van Veeteren is on the case once more in this breathless thriller of deception, blackmail, and cold murder.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. An utterly dull man, the only suspicious activity his surviving wife can report is a series of peculiar phone calls. Repeatedly the telephone would ring, offering no answer but an o...

It’s a sweltering summer in Sweden and Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is long overdue for a holiday when a secretive and dubious religious sect comes under investigation. One of its members, a girl on the cusp of adolescence, is found dead in the forest near their holiday camp, brutally raped and strangled; the discovery of her body has been phoned in by an anonymous caller.The members of the sect, the Pure Life, are led by Oscar Yellinek, a charismatic but unnervingly guarded messia...

For Waldemar Leverkuhn the day could not have begun more auspiciously. He and three of his friends, all retirees, have just won the lottery. It’s a modest sum when split four ways—certainly not enough to lift Waldemar out of the plain apartment he shares with his quiet, weary wife—but it’s enough for the old men to toast their good luck with a blowout at their favorite bar. The celebration ends, however, with Waldemar drunk, stumbling, belligerent, and eventually dead in his own bed, stabb...

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...