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 be interested in killing this man, a double murderer who spent 24 years in prison?

Determined to let no case go unsolved, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren reopens the case. What he discovers is that Verhaven was a star sprinter before he went to prison for allegedly killing two of his lovers. However, he never confessed to the murders and spent a lifetime proclaiming his innocence. Was he killed because someone thought he had not been punished enough? Or was someone afraid of Verhaven's revenge? A terrible suspicion stalks Van Veeteren: had Verhaven been telling the truth? Was he really innocent?

"Nesser's latest contemporary police procedural, set in his Swedish homeland, is an excellent puzzler that will remind many of the Inspector Morse series. Nesser's sleuth, Detective Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, is on the eve of major surgery when a baffling murder case is dumped on his team; a mutilated corpse has been found in a ditch, and is eventually identified as that of Leopold Verhaven, a recently released double murderer. Verhaven's crimes were odd ones-vicious attacks on women decades apart-and his own killing raises the spectre that he was not guilty of them. Van Veeteren and his squad deftly delve through decades of faded eyewitness recollections before reaching a satisfying solution, albeit one that requires the inspector to cross a line to achieve justice. The sardonic Van Veeteren is an enteratining lead character, and this book should lead many to seek out earlier entries in the series." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Precise plotting and deadpan irony make it highly entertaining, but the paucity of character development may make readers yearn for the installments that led up to it." Kirkus Reviews

"Another good Swedish writer emerges, an old hand, garlanded with his country's prizes, but only now translated into English." The Times (UK)

"Van Veeteren...is a warmer, more good-humoured personality than we have come to expect of Scandinavian policemen." The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

The author of Borkmann's Point spins a story that leaves even the most veteran crime novel readers chilled. Determined to let no case go unsolved, Inspector Van Veeteren uncovers revenge, murder, and the possibility that he sent an innocent man to prison. Could the real killer still be at large?

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 murders of two other women, and a former track star who served two sentences for murder and has been missing since the date of his return to society.

No one is who they appear to be, and a sleepy village finds itself reopening cases long considered closed. With the assistance of his colleagues, Van Veeteren faces the prospect of taking the law into his own hands in the face of a flawed system of justice. This taut psychological thriller affirms Håkan Nesser's place in the landscape of international crime fiction.

Håkan Nesser was born in 1950 in Sweden. In 1999 he was awarded the Scandinavian Crime Society's Glass Key Award for the best crime novel of the year for Carambole. His novels have been published to wide acclaim in eighteen countries.