DP54Cover - Deadly Pleasures

Usually I don’t care for police procedurals that
solve the crimes by anything less than good detection, but
I’ll have to make an exception for BORKMANN’S
POINT. The intriguing plot, interesting characters and
boffo ending, make this one a winner.
Larry Gandle opines: The major strength of
this work is the character of Van Veeteren. He is a likable
and highly competent detective. The minor characters are
also solid creations. This mystery is so character-driven that
despite the somewhat simple solution, the book, as a
whole, works remarkably well. Rating: B+
� THE RETURN (Pantheon, $22.95, 2007;
Macmillan, £12.99, 2007). 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 his innocence,
however, and was killed on the day of his return to society.
This latest murder is more than a little perplexing and
Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is determined to discover
the truth, even if it means taking the law into his own hands.
� THE MIND’S EYE (Pantheon, $22.95, June,
2008; Macmillan, £16.99, July, 2008). ‘Don’t you see,’
he’d have liked to ask her, ‘don’t you see, that if only
you’d told me everything that first time we could have
saved a life? Possibly two ...’ Janek Mitter stumbles into
his bathroom one morning after a night of heavy drinking,
to find his beautiful young wife, Eva, floating dead in the
bath. She has been brutally murdered. Yet even during his
trial Mitter cannot summon a single memory of attacking
Eva, nor a clue as to who could have killed her if he had not.
Only once he has been convicted and locked away in an
asylum for the criminally insane does he have a snatch of
insight -- but is it too late? Drawing a blank after exhaustive
interviews, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren remains convinced
that something, or someone, in the dead woman’s
life has caused these tragic events. And as he delves even
deeper, Van Veeteren realizes that the past never stops
haunting the present...
Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo
Series Character: Stockholm Detective Martin Beck
� ROSEANNA 1965
� THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE
1966
� THE MAN ON THE BALCONY 1967
� THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN 1968
� THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED
1969
� MURDER AT THE SAVOY 1970
� THE ABOMINABLE MAN 1971
� THE LOCKED ROOM 1972
� COP KILLER 1974
� THE TERRORISTS 1975
Deadly Pleasures
Johan Theorin
13
� ECHOES FROM THE DEAD (Doubleday,
£17.99, July 2008). Can you ever come to terms with a
missing child? Julia Davidsson has not. Her five-year-old
son disappeared twenty years previously on the Swedish
island of Oland. No trace of him has ever been found. Until
his shoe arrives in the post. It has been sent to Julia’s father,
a retired sea-captain still living on the island. Soon he and
Julia are piecing together fragments of the past -- fragments
that point inexorably to a local man called Nils Kant,
known to delight in the pain of others. But Nils Kant died
during the 1960s. So who is the stranger seen wandering
across the fields as darkness falls? It soon becomes clear
that someone wants to stop Julia’s search for the truth. And
that he’s much, much closer than she thinks.
Helene Tursten
Series Character: Detective Inspector Irene Huss,
Goteborg, Sweden
� DETECTIVE INSPECTOR HUSS (Soho Crime,
$25.00, 2003). Inspector Irene Huss, stationed in Gteborg,
is called through the rain-drenched wintry streets to the
scene of an apparent suicide. The dead man landed on the
sidewalk in front of his luxurious duplex apartment. He
was a wealthy financier connected, through an old-boys’
network, with the first families of Sweden. But the “Society
Suicide” turns out to have been a carefully plotted murder.
As more murders ensue, she tangles with street gang
members, skinheads, immigrants and neo-Nazis, a crosssection
of Sweden’s disaffected, in order to catch the killer.