22. Woman With Birthmark by Håkan Nesser

This is an older book (first published in Sweden in 1996, maybe?) but it was published in the United States in 2009.

It was a really good police procedural type of crime fiction. The main detective is Inspector Van Veeteren. I loved the way the detectives interact with each other. They were all very droll and sarcastic and you could tell that they all worked pretty well with each other. That was a nice change up from many books where the detectives don’t get along in that cliched kind of way.

from the jacket cover:

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 man, and the only suspicious activity his surviving wife can recall is a series of peculiar phone calls. Repeatedly the telephone would ring, offering nothing but the words of an obscure pop song from the 1960s. This siren song is linked to an identical murder, but the true link between these heinous crimes remains unknown, while a daughter’s pride grows with the satisfaction of vengeance and another detective’s lover offers telling insights that only an outsider could deduce.

This book did not have the huge amounts of character development that some of the other Scandi crime has, and I think that made this book go much faster, but it didn’t seem like a ripoff. It seemed to work well. The solving of the mystery seemed to be very realistic, the drudgery of questioning witnesses, the dead ends, and especially that it took months to solve.

Good Book. I’d like to read Nesser’s other books as well.

Tags: Hakan Nesser, Scandinavian crime fiction