Håkan Nesser was awarded the 1993 Swedish Crime Writer’s Academy Prize for new authors for Mind’s Eye (published in Sweden as Det Grovmaskiga Nätet); he received the best novel award in 1994 for Borkmann’s Point and in 1996 for Woman with Birthmark. In 1999 he was awarded the Crime Writers of Scandanavia’s Glass Key Award for the best crime novel of the year for Carambole. Nesser lives in Sweden and London.
Munster's Case (Inspector Van Veeteren Series #6)
Paperback
(Reprint)
- ISBN-13: 9780307946416
- Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Publication date: 05/21/2013
- Series: Inspector Van Veeteren Series , #6
- Edition description: Reprint
- Pages: 320
- Sales rank: 396,677
- Product dimensions: 5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)
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Intendent Münster, Inspector Van Veeteren’s right-hand man, and his beguiling colleague Ewa Moreno take center stage in the latest shocking thriller in Håkan Nesser’s internationally bestselling series.
The final day of Waldemar Leverkuhn’s life begins auspiciously: With three friends, he wins a modest sum in the lottery. But it ends, after a celebratory dinner, with him belligerent, drunk, and stumbling home to his bed, where he is brutally stabbed to death with a carving knife. The case seems to be going nowhere, until the reserved, weary widow confesses to the killing. When the Leverkuhns’ formidable neighbor goes missing, and then turns up gruesomely murdered, Münster and his team find a few, wispy clues that suggest her death is connected to Leverkuhn’s—clues that lead to a dark and terrible secret.
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“Nesser’s novels look for the roots of crime in the ills of society. . . . He has seized his chance to create his own dark poetry from these stark materials, and the effect is haunting.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Hakan Nesser’s Swedish detective novel plays like an English parlor mystery, a sort of mental shell game as police sit to interview potential witness after witness, nearly all of whom are suspects until they die themselves.” —Charleston Post & Courier
“Sterling . . . Gallows humor punctuates the solid plot as Münster’s introspective musings lead to a surprise ending.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
In this monochrome world, sunshine, like optimism, is fleeting and unreliable. But the gloom that Nesser creates is not merely a literary convention. Deftly conjured up in a few plain sentences, this subdued atmosphere is also oddly and disturbingly intimate. Its gray weight seems to shrink the distance between killer and victim, between violent death and everyday life. The crime scene in Münster's Case, for example, is as banal as this: "A hodgepodge of bad taste on the walls, furniture of the cheap fifties and sixties style. Separate bedrooms, bookcases with no books, and an awful lot of dried blood in and around Leverkuhn's sagging bed."
Seventy-two year old Waldemar Leverkuhn, drunk after a night out with old friends in his local bar, has been stabbed almost thirty times in his own bed. Was he murdered for his recent lottery winnings? For revenge? As young Inspector Münster and his team interview Leverkuhn's widow, his adult children, and his friends, all straightforward explanations recede. "You don't need to have a motive for killing anyone nowadays," one detective observes, and Münster agrees: "Motives are beginning to be a bit old-fashioned." There is a motive, of course. It emerges incrementally as Leverkuhn's past is examined, but Nesser, sly as ever, also makes the resolution profoundly shocking. To reach it, Münster turns for advice to his mentor, Inspector Van Veeteren, the protagonist of Nesser's previous novels in this series.
"Things seem to be pulling in different directions," the philosophical Van Veeteren tells Münster when asked for his opinion. "The threads seem to be unwinding instead of coming together." By then, a second murder has been committed, and the body parts of a professionally butchered corpse have been stumbled upon. An astonishing act by Leverkhun's dowdy, expressionless widow takes the novel temporarily into the courtroom, yet even then Nesser keeps the plot off balance and vibrating with unease.
A jury's verdict is not the same thing as the truth; that appears to reside among Leverkhun's three children. One daughter is in a mental hospital, the other daughter and son are as unremarkable as the dull parents with whom they had little contact. In scenes that are both delicate and unadorned, Nesser presents the Leverkhuns in all their drabness and then gradually allows us glimpses of their turbulent inner lives. "Something had come home after a long journey," their mother reflects as her own life is about to end abruptly. Münster suspects it is the murderer that had come home, and this suspicion proves almost fatal as Nesser smoothly heightens the tension without disturbing the surface of this brutal, compassionate novel.
Anna Mundow, a longtime contributor to The Irish Times and The Boston Globe, has written for The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications.
Reviewer: Anna Mundow
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