The final instalment of Leif G.W. Persson's Story of a Crime series feels like a bit of a letdown.

Now approaching retirement as head of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Las Martin Johansson decides to take one last crack at solving the murder of Swedish PM Olof Palme, the subject of the first book in the series, Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End.

Johannson assembles a team of detectives and instructs them to comb through twenty years of disorganised archives and identify the killer. To avoid getting noses out of joint, he does this under the cover of getting the archives collated and re-organised into a more searchable form.

Detectives Holt, Lewin and Mattei reluctantly get started on this massive task. Meanwhile the corrupt Inspector Backstrom gets wind of this and launches an extra-curricular investigation of his own, of an entirely different nature. Inevitably, these two investigations eventually converge on one figure.

My concern with this novel is that it all just seemed to easy for these investigators. What they find in a relatively short time does not seem nearly challenging enough or difficult enough to explain why a vast investigative team could not find this out over twenty years. Persson's ending needed to be more arcane and more baffling than it is. I was also not a fan of the frequent plot points that start up and then are quickly killed off, and the amount that is left unexplained after reading thousands of pages of this story. I especially found the key plot point of Waltin's university club puerile and distasteful; it didn't need to be as crass as Persson decides to make it.

I enjoyed the paranoia, bafflement and tension of Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End, and I wish now that I had left it there. ( )

Book was way too unnecessarily long. ( )

Interesting and complex, not quite as absorbing as I had hoped ( )

15 augusti 2007 och måttet är rågat för Lars Martin Johansson, chef för rikskriminalen. Han tänker klara upp Palme-mordet. Tidpunkten för preskription ligger inte alltför långt bort, och hans egen pensionering kryper närmare. Vad vore bättre än att kröna karriären med en lösning av detta fall?
I hemlighet samlar han de vassaste medarbetarna, förnekar i media att en ny utredning inletts och tillsammans börjar de med fräscha ögon gå igenom det enormt omfattande utredningsmaterialet. Christer Pettersson är inte Palme-mördaren. Det slår man fast snabbt.
Ett nytt överraskande spår växer istället fram, sakta men säkert. Men om spåret är det rätta -- går sanningen att offentliggöra

The author writes big dense Swedish police misbehavior tomes and provides endless detail about the food, the landscape, and the overall personality of the Swedish population. For every spoken word, there is an internal thought expressed. So there are two soundtracks running through the trilogy, this as Part The Third, centered around the mysterious unsolved murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme and the over thirty years of fruitless investigation. There are no dull characters here, just a myriad of them and some unravelings that are difficult to follow. Persson is only a bit like that more famous Swede Steig Larsson - he is not really like any other author I've ever read. I don't really know why I love his books, but I do.