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Zusatztext “A police procedural from the top drawer.”—Colin Dexter! from the introduction“Superbly well done. . . . Stunning right up to the last paragraph.”— New York Magazine“The first great series of police thrillers. . . . Truly exciting.”—Michael Ondaatje“Sjöwall and Wahlöö! beside writers such as Raymond Chandler! Dashiell Hammett and Georges Simenon! have shaped the genre and the reader's expectations as to what crime fiction should be.”—Jo Nesbo Informationen zum Autor Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö With a New Introduction by Colin Dexter Klappentext The lightning-paced fifth novel in the Martin Beck mystery series by the internationally renowned crime writing duo, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, finds Beck investigating one of the strangest, most violent, and unforgettable crimes of his career.The incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the building's eleven occupants. And if one of Martin Beck's colleagues hadn't been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe because somehow a regulation fire-truck has vanished. Was it terrorism, suicide, or simply a gas leak? And what if, anything, did the explosion have to do with the peculiar death earlier that day of a 46-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: "Martin Beck"? Leseprobe 1The man lying dead on the tidily made bed had first taken off his jacket and tie and hung them over the chair by the door. He had then unlaced his shoes, placed them under the chair and stuck his feet into a pair of black leather slippers. He had smoked three filter-tipped cigarettes and stubbed them out in the ashtray on the bedside table. Then he had lain down on his back on the bed and shot himself through the mouth.That did not look quite so tidy.His nearest neighbor was a prematurely retired army captain who had been injured in the hip during an elk hunt the previous year. He had suffered from insomnia after the accident and often sat up at night playing solitaire. He was just getting the deck of cards out when he heard the shot on the other side of the wall and he at once called the police.It was twenty to four on the morning of the seventh of March when two radio police broke the lock on the door and made their way into the apartment, inside which the man on the bed had been dead for thirty-two minutes. It did not take them long to establish the fact that the man almost certainly had committed suicide. Before returning to their car to report the death over the radio, they looked around the apartment, which in fact they should not have done. Apart from the bedroom, it consisted of a living room, kitchen, hall, bathroom and wardrobe. They could find no message or farewell letter. The only written matter visible was two words on the pad by the telephone in the living room. The two words formed a name. A name which both policemen knew well.Martin Beck.It was Ottilia's name day.Soon after eleven in the morning, Martin Beck left the South police station and went and stood in the line at the state liquor store in Karusellpian. He bought a bottle of Nutty Solera. On the way to the subway, he also bought a dozen red tulips and a can of English cheese biscuits. One of the six names his mother had been given at baptism was Ottilia and he was going out to congratulate her on her name day.The old people's home was large and very old. Much too old and inconvenient according to those who had to work there. Martin Beck's mother had moved there a year ago, not because she had been unable to manage on her own, for she was still lively and relatively fit at seventy-eight, but because she had not wanted to be a burden on her only child. So in good time she had ensured herself a place in the home and when a desirable room had become vacant, that is, when the previous occupant had died, she had got...
