Another really good story from the masters. ( )

A naked woman was dredged up from the bottom of Sweden's beautiful Lake Vattern one July day. Where had she come from? How had she got there? And why? . . . a rash of brutal muggings and child sex-murders with the elusive mugger perhaps the only person in Stockholm to have seen the murderer . . . the search for a hard-drinking well-known Swedish journalist in Budapest, who has vanished without a trace . . . eight people were shot to death in a Stockholm bus, with one of the dead being an ambitious young detective whose private life was both perverse and mysterious . . . an incendiary device blows the roof off a Stockholm apartment house one cold winter night interrupting the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, and for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain - the fire department didn't arrive until too late. How could a regulation-sized ladder truck vanish in the center of Stockholm? . . . the peculiar death of a 46-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: 'Martin Beck'? . . . the murder of a powerful Swedish industrialist during his after-dinner speech in the elegant Hotel Savoy with a shot in the head . . . the bloody murder of a police captain in his hospital room by a demented and deadly rifleman exposing the particularly unsavory history of a man who spent forty years practicing brutality and force . . . a decayed corpse with a bullet through its head is found inside a locked room. Suicide? Perhaps - but inside the locked room there is no gun. A young blonde in sunglasses holds up a bank and shoots the hapless citizen who moves to stop her . . . a blond woman in her middle thirties in a small Swedish town is brutally murdered and left buried in a swamp. Some weeks later her decomposing body is found accidentally by a group of hikers. Prime suspects are the convicted sex murderer who was her only neighbor on a lonely country road, and her former husband - a rough, drunken retired sailor. Meanwhile, on a quiet suburban street in another part of Sweden, a midnight shootout take place between three cops and two teenage boys. Dead: one cop and two teenage boys. Wounded: two cops. Escaped: one kid . . . an American senator visits Stockholm and Martin Beck tries to protect him from an international gang of terrorists, while they decide that Beck too should be removed from the scene . . . a millionaire pornographer bludgeoned to death in his own bathtub . . . a young girl, a Swedish hippie, caught up unexpectedly in the maze of police bureaucracy . . . and of course, a homicide detective who is a chain smoker with a graveyard cough and an abused stomach; a 'weekend' sailor who likes to spend what time he has making model ships, living in a gray suburban apartment with his once pretty wife and two children with whom he has few points of contact and little in common. ( )

Perhaps the first time that as a reader up feel the 10 Martin beck novels have been written as a coherant series of 300 chapters rather than as 10 descrete books, inasmuch as that this book is very short and barely stands up on it's own. However as an exert of the types of crimes police were facing in Stockholm it is a fitting chapter in the lives of Martin Beck and team.

A desperado has a sudden passion for killing policemen. When former chief inspector Nymes is found brutally stabbed in a hospital ward one of the Serious Crimes unit's first thoughts is thta it might be revenge from some criminal who disliked Nymes' particular methods of police treatment.

What follows is short, ugly, tour round some of Stockholm's less salubrious policing practises. How true or accurate it was at the time, or indeed remains today is up for debate - but it's very likely that it was based at least in part on true incidents, and magnified to create suitable dramatic tension. However it's not totaly without it's humour as a coin ladden bum attempts to pass a pickled pig's led to our intrepid radio car team of ordinary constables. Last time the bum was arrested he had over 3000 coins in his pockets which took 7 hous to inventory. I wonder if his tactic has ever been used for real?

The social commentry is much darker - citizens venting their anger at the police for percieved injustices at the turbulent changes in their lives that multicultiural, multinational living is introducing, and the police venting their resentment upon the victims who require them to spend som any hours on overtime (unpaid) and away from their families.

it is the frist time in the series that there is no description of naked females.

Readable, but only as part of the continuing struggles of Beck and co.
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The seventh Martin Beck novel is odd because it’s thematically very similar to the previous volume, Murder at the Savoy. Once again an unpleasant and powerful man is murdered and once again it’s not obviously a bad thing. The difference is that this victim is a high-ranking policeman, brutally murdered in his hospital room.

While the last book was about the damage done by the ruthless pursuit of wealth, this one is about abuse of power, specifically police power. There’s lots of asides on the role of the police, specifically the right of the police to kill. Typically for the series, the issue is given a quirky twist at the end.
Full review: http://www.26books.com/?p=534