Murder at the Savoy

Murder at the Savoy is a crime novel from 1971 and the sixth in Sjowall/Wahloo's Martin Beck series.

A wealthy business man is shot to death during lunch at the Savoy hotel in the southern Swedish city of Malmo. No one in the hotel gets a good look at the murderer, who calmly escapes through an open window and leaves on a bicycle. Due to the nature of the victim and his business, Martin Beck is called from Stockholm to solve the case. As Beck investigates the murder and learn more about the victim's corrupt business practices, he starts sympathising more with the killer than the victim.

The story in Murder at the Savoy moves along slowly and is fairly predictable. It is one of the weaker books in the Martin Beck series but it is still a pretty good read.

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End is a political thriller by Leif G.W. Persson, and it is the first novel in the 'Fall of the Welfare State' trilogy.

In this novel, Persson presents a possible solution to the murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. The story begins with the apparent suicide of John Krassner, an American journalist visiting Stockholm. By accident, police Inspector Lars Martin Johansson and his colleagues get involved in the case and the deeper they look, the more they see that everything doesn't add up the way it's supposed to.

This book is very long and complex and while the story is largely told from Lars Martin Johansson's point of view, Persson frequently adopts the point of view of many of the other characters, moving back and forth in the chronology.

Håkan Nesser - The Mind's Eye

Håkan Nesser's The Mind's Eye (Swedish: Det grovmaskiga nätet) is the first of the Inspector Van Veeteren stories to be translated into English.

This story begins with a man, Janek Mitter waking up with a terrible hangover and finding his wife lying facedown in the bathtub, dead. Mitter, who can not remember a thing, is found guilty and imprisoned in a mental institution. Van Veeteren finds himself wondering if he really is guilty when Mitter is found murdered in the mental institution. The only way to get to the bottom of these crimes is for Van Veeteren to investigate and learn everything he can about their past lives.

Faceless Killers Review

Faceless Killers is the first of Henning Mankell's crime novels about Kurt Wallander, a middle-aged Swedish police detective working in the small town of Ystad. His wife has just left him, he drinks and eats too much and is starting to become increasingly disillusioned with his work.

The story begins when an elderly couple are found murdered in their farmhouse in southern Sweden. Right before her death, the woman repeats the word 'foreign' which leads to several attacks on immigrants by the local community. Eventually this leads to the murder of a Somali refugee. Now it's up to Kurt Wallander and the police team to investigate if the crimes are linked, and if the murdered wife's last words have any significance.

In 1992 this book won the Glass Key award, a literature award given annually to Nordic crime novel authors.