Added to the long line of Swedish police mystery series, we now have English translations of the Inspector Van Veeteren mysteries by Hakan Nesser. The first of these to reach English translation is his second book: Borkmann's Point [ amazon.com or borders.com ].
Borkmann's Point is more in tune with the sorrowful and lonely Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell than the older Beck series by Sjowall and Wahloo. The principal, Van Veeteren, has the same detached approach to working through the mystery, but Nesser focuses on the drudgery of the work needed to find solutions to crimes. That drudgery doesn't get in the way of a good story and the principal vehicle for the story is a set of characters who shift back and forwards in the story's frame almost as silently as wolves in a Swedish forest.
In this case, the mystery involves sending Van Veeteren to a tiny police force to assist in the investigation of two ugly axe murders. Van Veeteren leaves during a vacation and the investigation is colored by the loss of his vacation and the difficulty of making progress. The story follows Van Veeteren's emerging relationship with an older chief of police and the sheer grind of attempting to get enough information to draw conclusions about the axe murders. The half of the story line that follows Van Veeteren's relationship with the aging cop is bittersweet and unusual in a police procedural. The other half, following the investigation itself, is simply less compelling stuff.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is that, for the alert reader, the murderer is identified about two-thirds of the way through the book. This makes the last third a story of finding the evidence needed to compel the murderer to confess or to confront them with their guilt. It's this last third of the novel that is worth the price of admission. The grace and light style of this final part of the story is exceptional. This makes the book seem like part of a series that will certainly be a worthy addition to the remarkable tradition of Swedish police procedurals. Nesser uses this last third of the book as a meditation on how difficult investigations can be and how they are both a physical and mental exercise. There's not a huge set piece at the end, just the inevitable and gradual accumulation of information and personal characteristics that leads to a very surprising but believable conclusion.
Here's hoping that there's more Van Veeteren to come in English. Recommended to mystery readers.
[ 256 pages; ISBN 978-0333989845; read it in the Hardcover version ]
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