Excerpt from back cover:
“The masterful first novel in the Martin Beck series of mysteries by the internationally renowned crime writing duo Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, fins Beck hunting for the murderer of a lonely traveler. On a July afternoon, a young woman’s body is dredged from Sweden’s beautiful Lake Vattern. With no clues, Beck begins an investigation not only to uncover a murderer but also to discover who the victim was. Three months later, all Back knows is that her name is Roseanna and that she could have been strangled by any one of eighty-five people on a cruise. As the melancholic Beck narrows the list of suspects, he is drawn increasingly to the enigma of the victim, a free-spirited traveler with a penchant for casual sex, and to the psychopathology of a murderer with a distinctive-indeed, terrifying-sense of propriety.”
I have been spoiled with white knuckle murder mysteries that I almost didn’t finish this book. Written in 1965, it really made me slow down and think about crimes and how they were solved back then. I think this book was a breath of fresh air, mostly because I’m not used to the old detective or manual solving of a murder. I gave this book a chance and really learned how murders were solved back in the 60s. This book took place mostly in Sweden, with many references to other parts of the world, including Lincoln, Nebraska, where the murder victim was from. If you can get past the obvious grammatical errors made during the translation from Swedish to English, then it is worth the read. However, you have to give this book a chance because the main climax comes about 50 pages to the end of the book. Please don’t read just the last pages of the book because it gives an overview of most of the passengers of the boat, why Detective Martin Beck is the way he is, and the gripping details as to how they solved a virtually unsolvable crime. All they started out with was a dead body in a lake.
My rating: 4 out of 5
Next book review: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
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