The Locked Room (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard)

The stunning eighth installment in the Martin Beck mystery series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö is a masterful take on a classic locked room mystery.

A young blonde in sunglasses robs a bank and kills a hapless citizen. Across town, a corpse with a bullet shot through its heart is found in a locked room – with no gun at the scene. The crimes seem disparate, but to Martin Beck they are two pieces of the same puzzle, and solving it becomes the one way he can escape the pains of his failed marriage and the lingering effects of a near-fatal bullet wound. Exploring the ramifications of egotism and intellect, luck and accident, this tour de force of detection bears the unmistakable substance and gravity of real life.

"The best yet in a superb series of mysteries." Minneapolis Tribune

"Lively, stylistically taut...Sjöwall and Wahlöö changed the genre." Henning Mankell

"One of the most authentic, gripping and profound collections of police procedurals ever accomplished." Michael Connelly

"[Martin Beck is] a man driven to solve puzzles, with a small tragic intuition swimming deep is his mental waters that will surface suddenly to give a muted howl and then dive down again." The New York Times

"It's hard to think of any other thriller writers (apart from Simenon perhaps) who can capture so much of a society in a couple of hundred pages and yet still hold true to the thriller form." Sean and Nicci French

A woman robs a bank. A corpse is found shot through the heart in a room locked from within — no firearm in sight. To the eerily intuitive Inspector Martin Beck, these seemingly disparate cases are facets of the same puzzle, and solving it is of vital importance. Only by finding our what happened in the locked room can Beck — haunted by a near-fatal bullet wound and the demise of a soulless marriage — escape from an airtight prison of his own.

From its classic premise, The Locked Room accelerates into an engrossing novel of the mind. Exploring the ramifications of egotism and intellect, luck and accident, and set against the backdrop of the inspired deductions and monstrous errors of Martin Beck and the Stockholm Homicide Squad, this tour de force of detection bears the unmistakable substance and gravity of real life.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, her husband and coauthor, wrote ten Martin Beck mysteries. Mr Wahlöö, who died in 1975, was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and wrote numerous radio and television plays, film scripts, short stories, and novels. Maj Sjöwall is also a poet.