Seedy, disturbing, efficently-told yarn on that age-old bugaboo: misogyny and the basic murderousness of a man if a woman so much as vocalizes a soupçon of undesire for him. It's the first of a series of Scandinavian police procedurals I'm now dying to read more of: a mild-mannered and not-terribly-interesting detective, Martin Beck, ignores his wife at home as he becomes obsessively fixated on solving the rape and killing of an unidentified blonde who washes up Laura Palmer-style in a Swedish lake. The problem: any man in the world is a suspect. And just such an Anyman becomes the unremarkable, boring, milquetoast strangler who wants to purify the world of all that sexy girly dirtiness — as much as he wants it, too. This and the rest of the other nine books in the Martin Beck cycle were written by a Marxist Swedish married couple, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö; this must be one of the cleanest, most unemotional detective yarns ever spun. No baroque Chanderlisms here à la "I had to hit the hay and hit it hard"; it's just-the-facts, and the simple reporting of facts and twisted ideological fronts for male inadequacy — "They're disgusting. They sparkle and exult with their decadence, and later they're insolent and offensive" — are baroque in and of themselves. Pair it with Dorothy B. Hughes's IN A LONELY PLACE. I lucked into the entire set for about $30 at the New Haven bookstore, Grey Matter; cannot wait for more of the chill adventures of Martin Beck.