FREE: The Locked Room

The listing, The Locked Room has ended.

Some fifteen months have passed since the events of The Abominable Man, and Martin Beck is still recovering from a bullet wound that almost killed him. As the novel opens, he's going back to work, and upon his return, Kollberg hands him a case file. He notes to Martin Beck that it was too bad Beck didn't read detective stories, because if he did, he'd probably appreciate the case even more. As it turns out, what he's handed over is the case of Karl Edvin Svard, who died from a gunshot in a locked room. The police suspect suicide, but the problem is that there's no gun anywhere. Because the original investigators thought it was suicide, they treated the case rather lackadaisacally, and this attitude rippled outwards, even down to the medical examiner. Beck now has to go back and start over from the beginning to make any sense of the case. Meanwhile, there is an ongoing series of bank robberies that are plaguing the police, and the National Police Commissioner has turned the investigations over to one Sten "Bulldozer" Olsson, in charge of a newly-formed special squad. Olsson isn't a policeman, but an overconfident and overzealous district attorney, for whom life was "one big jolly game". The squad spends a great deal of its time working on a small group of criminals who Olsson is convinced are the robbers -- but who also may be using their ill-gotten gain to fund larger crimes. There's a great deal to be said about the obvious differences in the ways in which Martin Beck and Olsson go about doing their jobs in this book