I love Scandinavia, all of Scandinavia. And I love Scandinavian writers, even though I know it's wrong to generalize and somewhere there might be some Scandinavian writers who suck. But that's not the case with Leif Persson. The author of this book is a well-known professor of criminology and teaches at none other than the Stockholm National Police School, as well as having been a consultant to the Swedish Ministry of Justice and the Swedish Secret Service. I would say that there is enough to define him as a writer who knows about thrillers, police investigations, mysteries and criminals ...
The protagonist of this book is Commissioner Evert Backstrom, one of the most negative characters I have met while reading hundreds of books. Short, fat, macho, unpleasant and not at all interested in being pleasant, hateful, he has no investigative qualities and yet he does not make a problem of it, since the cases that happen to him, in one way or another, he resolves them all the same, either by luck or by intuition or by stealing the merits of others. These solved cases made him a wizard of investigations in the eyes of people but in reality they were just strokes of luck. Backstrom is just a conceited, an unsocial, a lazy, a habitual, an alcoholic and a man who goes with prostitutes. All the flaws a cop might have, he has them all. Yet in all of Sweden he is the most admired policeman, the one who represents the maximum security of the citizens. And so does his little neighbor, Edvin, who one day rings at his door. For Backstrom, the child represents an exception to the contempt he reserves for the rest of humanity. It may also be because Edvin carries out all the small services that Backstrom commissions him to do: he sends him to buy him the newspaper, food, drinks, and has always found a great precision in the child, who is therefore almost sympathetic to him. When Backstrom opens the door Edvin tells him that during an excursion with the Scouts group he found a skull with a bullet hole clearly visible on the temple. Edvin is 100 times smarter than Backstrom and points out that the bullet is a .22 caliber, that the skull is certainly of a young woman and that it could be more murder than suicide given the location of the hole. Backstrom is impressed by the child's skill and transfers all these details to his right arm, Annika Carlsson, thus giving her the investigation so to be able to go back to doing what he likes most, that is to eat and to go with women. Meanwhile, the police do their job and it emerges that the bullet is actually a .22 caliber, fired from a rifle at close range, while the victim turned her head and it also emerges that the victim has a name, Jaidee and that she was born in Thailand in 1973, she married a Swedish man and she is present in the police archives because she was registered as having died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami…. A nice mystery, isn't it? And in fact the story is very intriguing and I could not avoid to continue reading and reading to understand how this story was going to end, to understand what the ending was: an ending that is truly unexpected, a real twist worthy of a great writer, who with his narrative ability leads the reader where he wants, making him believe what he wants. It obviously would be a crime to reveal to you how the book ends.
A book that I really liked for the plot and that I liked even more for the Swedish setting in which it takes place: Sweden with its wild nature, which can be sensed even if the author certainly does not exaggerate in the descriptions. The book is quite long (almost 500 pages) but can be read without effort, because in addition to the truly mysterious plot, you can also smile at Backstrom's personality and all the politically incorrect things he thinks, does and says.