I have to admire a writer who can hold your interest when so plainly outlining the drudgery & dreariness of so much police work and when the motives & methods of the killer are laid bare. I'm not sure what it is with Nesser's writing when his characters are so depressed by much of their work much of the time.

I really loved the tone and the plot. I didn't get a great feel for all the different characters, but I'm sure that's because I jumped in to the middle of a series. I'll definitely be reading more!

3 sessions to read this one, so it was quick quality read with all the trappings of a V.V. crime drama

Zatím top kousek ze série s Van Veeterenem. Zdařilá zápletka, vlastně dost akční.

This is the fourth novel in the Inspector Van Veeteren series, but you don’t need to have read the other three to understand everything.

At least I haven’t read the rest of the series and I don’t think I missed anything important (or anything at all).

Maybe if you know what happens in the previous books you have more insight on the characters, but they are described here as if the reader is meeting them for the first time.

The book in general is okay, but most of the plot is predictable.

Once you figure out the sex of the murderer, than it appears obvious why the victims are murdered.

Love these. Plot was a bit tedious, but the characters continue to fascinate.

Nesser is not a noir as some Nordic writers, good story but not terribly memorable.

The trouble with reading a book in translation is that you never know how true it is to the original. The title, Woman with Birthmark, for example, seems to be missing a couple words, as do many sentences in the book. The dialog seems especially stilted with short, choppy sentences back and forth (and back and forth again). It seems almost as if the characters are talking in shorthand, which doesn't feel natural.

There isn't much of a mystery. We know who did it from the start and can guess at the reason fairly quickly. We follow the police as they try to solve the murders, but their investigation doesn't really matter because they are led to the conclusion by the murderer herself.

All in all, a bit of an unsatisfying read.

Another Swedish mystery, this one dealing with Inspector Van Veteeren and his group, who are maybe a more interesting and diverse group than I'm used to-- some of them, like his lead detective (Reinhart?) and female detective Ewa Moreno, both play significant parts in the story.

This time around, at least, the mystery itself isn't all that interesting-- a woman on a plot to kill the four men who raped her mom thirty years earlier-- but Nesser gives a few twists that are kind of interesting, if minor-- for example, I kind of like that there's no real morality to the question of prostitution, and likewise no attempt to demonize the woman at the center by showing us some simulacrum of her fractured mental state. In fact, she appears a rational actor throughout, as does nearly every character here.

I suppose that's part of what makes this reading experience such a placid one--everyone is so decent and reasonable. It's a little weird, actually.

I do wonder a bit about the translation, which I'm not usually one to do. But the title kind of sucks here, bearing almost no correlation to what actually occurs in the story. And there's a badly mangled passage, about "the discreet charm of the middle class," which I think both misses the reference to the Bunuel film and which also makes the sentence in which it appears a little flat. The only explanation I can make for these odd choices are ones of translator fault.