Inspector Van Veeteren

Chief Inspector Van Veeteren knew that murder cases were never as open-and-shut as this one: Janek Mitter woke one morning with a brutal hangover and discovered his wife of three months lying facedown in the bathtub, dead. With only the flimsiest excuse as his defense, he is found guilty of a drunken crime of passion and imprisoned in a mental institution. But Van Veeteren's suspicions about the identity of the killer are borne out when Mitter also becomes a murder victim. Now the chief inspector launches a full-scale investigation of the two slayings. But it may only be the unspoken secrets of the deadrevealed in a mysterious letter that Mitter wrote shortly before his death - that will finally allow Van Veeteren to unmask the killer and expose the shocking root of this sordid violence.

An ex-con is brutally murdered with an ax in Kaalbringen. Then the body of a wealthy real estate mogul is found, also the victim of a violent attack. There appears to be a serial killer on the loose, and Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is called in to help the local police. As details surrounding the grisly murders are collected, Van Veeteren finds little to go on. But then there's another murder, and shortly thereafter one of Van Veeteren's colleagues, a promising female detective, goes missing - perhaps because the criminal knows she has come too close to the truth. . . .

While on a field trip through the woods on the outskirts of Behren, a young girl stumbles upon a decomposing body wrapped in a carpet and lying in a ditch. The body has no hands, feet, or head, but this was not the work of wild animals. A brutal killer is on the loosebut who is the victim? From the hospital bed where he is recovering from surgery, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren begins to piece together the fragmentary clues that involve a nun who hides a secret, a crippled woman, the murders of two other women, and a former track star who served two sentences for murder and has been missing since the date of his return to society. No one is who they appear to be, and a sleepy village finds itself reopening cases long considered closed. With the assistance of his colleagues, Van Veeteren faces the prospect of taking the law into his own hands in the face of a flawed system of justice.

After hearing her mother's deathbed confession and following the dreary funeral, Maria Adler realizes she has no other option but to seize upon her mother's imperative to do something. Dissolving the life she loathes, Maria changes her appearance and disappears. When she emerges, revenge is her sole occupation. Inspector Van Veeteren and his associates are left bewildered by the curious murder of a man shot twice in the heart and twice below the belt. He was a quiet, utterly dull man, and the only suspicious activity his surviving wife can recall is a series of peculiar phone calls. Repeatedly the telephone would ring, offering nothing but the words of an obscure pop song from the 1960s. This siren song is linked to an identical murder, but the true link between these heinous crimes remains unknown, while a daughter's pride grows with the satisfaction of vengeance and another detective's lover offers telling insights that only an outsider could deduce. With the critical eye and cool observation necessary for a successful chess match, Van Veeteren pursues his subject across the country, wading through outrageous leads and fruitless tips to a chilling conclusion.

A secretive and dubious religious sect comes under investigation as one of their young members, a girl on the cusp of puberty, is found dead in the forest, brutally raped and strangled. Adopting to remain silent over the incident rather than defend themselves, the members of The Pure Lifeled by their intelligent but perturbing messiah figure, Oscar Yellineck simultaneously anger and mystify Van Veeteren and the other detectives on the case. What's more, the girl's murder was tipped off by an unidentified woman, whose role becomes doubly perplexing as a string of increasingly horrifying new crimes defies everything the police thought they knew about the case and its sequence of events.

For Waldemar Leverkuhn, a retiree living with his wife in a small unit in an unassuming block of apartments, the day couldn't begin more auspiciously. He, along with three friends, have won the lottery. It's a modest but healthy sum of money and the old men toast to their good luck with a celebratory dinner at their usual haunt. The day ends, however, with Leverkuhn drunk, stumbling, belligerent, and eventually dead in his bed, stabbed twenty-eight times in the chest with a carving knife. After a cursory investigation on Leverkuhn's few friends and irritable family members that leads to more questions than answers, Leverkuhn's quiet, weary wife incredibly confesses to her husband's murder. The case seems to have solved itself, but when the Leverkuhn's formidable neighbor, Else Van Eck, goes missing and is later discovered in gruesome fashion, Detective Mnster and his team find themselves back in the fog and chasing after whisps of clues that indicate that the murders are inextricably linked.

In the middle of the night, a boy is struck by a car after leaving his girlfriend's house. The driver, drunk, leaves the boy's body by the side of the road and, wrestling with guilt, tries to put it all out of his mind, until a blackmail note arrives. In the meantime, Reinhart, the new chief inspector of the Maardam police force, has set his team to work. But a second, possibly related killing proves that this is no ordinary case. The police, desperate for answers, struggle to decipher the clues to these appalling crimes, but as the killer becomes increasingly unhinged and unpredictable, Van Veeteren, now retired, is compelled to re-enter the world he left behind. He will face the greatest trial of his career as he seeks vengeance for the death of someone who was close to him. Told with Håkan Nesser's trademark eye for detail, breakneck plotting, and gut-wrenching moral tension, Hour of the Wolf finds the Nordic noir superstar spinning one of his most spellbinding tales yet.