Inspector Van Veeteren

Chief Inspector Van Veeteren knew that murder cases were never as open-and-shut as this one: Janek Mitter woke one morning with a brutal hangover and discovered his wife of three months lying facedown in the bathtub, dead. With only the flimsiest excuse as his defense, he is found guilty of a drunken crime of passion and imprisoned in a mental institution.

Janek Mitter stumbles into his bathroom one morning after a night of heavy drinking, to find his beautiful young wife, Eva, floating dead in the bath. She has been brutally murdered. Yet even during his trial Mitter cannot summon a single memory of attacking Eva, nor a clue as to who could have killed her if he had not. Only once he has been convicted and locked away in an asylum for the criminally insane does he have a snatch of insight - but is it too late?

Two men are brutally murdered with an axe in the quiet coastal town of Kaalbringen, and Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, bored on holiday nearby, is summoned to assist the local authorities. The local police chief, just days away from retirement, is determined to wrap things up before he goes. But there is no clear link between the victims. Then one of Van Veeteren's colleagues, a brilliant young female detective, goes missing - perhaps she has reached Borkmann's Point before anyone else....

An ex-con is brutally murdered with an ax in Kaalbringen. Then the body of a wealthy real estate mogul is found, also the victim of a violent attack. There appears to be a serial killer on the loose, and Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is called in to help the local police. As details surrounding the grisly murders are collected, Van Veeteren finds little to go on. But then there's another murder, and shortly thereafter one of Van Veeteren's colleagues, a promising female detective, goes missing.

An unmissable hospital appointment is looming for Inspector Van Veeteren when a corpse is found rolled in a rotting carpet by a young child playing in a local beauty spot. Missing head and limbs, the torso is too badly decomposed for forensic identification - bar one crucial detail.... Circumstantial evidence soon points to a local man, a double murderer who disappeared nine months before, shortly after being released on parole - a local hero turned monster after being convicted of killing two women over a span of three decades.

After hearing her mother’s deathbed confession and following the dreary funeral, Maria Adler realizes she has no other option but to seize upon her mother’s imperative to do something. Dissolving the life she loathes, Maria changes her appearance and disappears. When she emerges, revenge is her sole occupation. Inspector Van Veeteren and his associates are left bewildered by the curious murder of a man shot twice in the heart and twice below the belt. He was a quiet, utterly dull man, and the only suspicious activity his surviving wife can recall is a series of peculiar phone calls.

A young woman shivers in the December cold as her mother's body is laid to rest in a cemetery. The only thing that warms her is the thought of the revenge she will soon take.... Then a middle-aged man is killed at his home, shot twice in the chest and twice below the belt. He had recently received a series of bizarre phone calls where an old song is played down the line - evoking an eerie sense of both familiarity and unease. Before the police can find the culprit, a second man is killed in the same way.

In the heart of summer, the country swelters in a fug of heat. In the beautiful forested lake town of Sorbinowo, Sergeant Merwin Kluuge's tranquil existence is shattered when he receives a phone call from an anonymous woman. She tells him that a girl has gone missing from the summer camp of the mysterious The Pure Life, a religious sect buried deep in the woods. Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is recruited to help solve the mystery.

A secretive and dubious religious sect comes under investigation as one of their young members, a girl on the cusp of puberty, is found dead in the forest, brutally raped and strangled. Adopting to remain silent over the incident rather than defend themselves, the members of The Pure Life - led by their intelligent but perturbing messiah figure, Oscar Yellineck - simultaneously anger and mystify Van Veeteren and the other detectives on the case.

For Waldemar Leverkuhn, a retiree living with his wife in a small unit in an unassuming block of apartments, the day couldn't begin more auspiciously. He, along with three friends, have won the lottery. It's a modest but healthy sum of money and the old men toast to their good luck with a celebratory dinner. The day ends, however, with Leverkuhn drunk, belligerent, and eventually dead in his bed, stabbed 28 times in the chest. After a cursory investigation, Leverkuhn's quiet, weary wife incredibly confesses to murder.

Four friends celebrate winning the lottery. Just hours later, one of them - Waldemar Leverkuhn - is found in his home, stabbed to death. With Chief Inspector Van Veeteren on sabbatical, working in a secondhand bookshop, the case is assigned to Inspector Münster. But when another member of the lottery group disappears as well as Leverkuhn's neighbour, Münster appeals to Van Veeteren for assistance.

In the dead of night, in the pouring rain, a drunk driver smashes his car into a young man. He abandons the body at the side of the road, but the incident will set in motion a chain of events which will change his life forever. Soon Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, now retired from the Maardam police force, will face his greatest trial yet as someone close to him is, inexplicably, murdered.

It starts with a drunk man killing a boy as he hits him with his car. Thinking no one has seen him, he feels he's off the hook. Until he receives a message telling him that the sender knows what he's done, and unless he pays him a ransom, to be left in a bag at a secluded men's room, he'll squeal. The killer does as instructed, but as he sees a young man leave with said bag, he then kills the young man.

A community is left reeling after a teacher - Arnold Maager - is convicted of murdering his female pupil Winnie Maas. It seems the girl had been pregnant with Maager's child. Years later, on her 18th birthday, Maager's daughter Mikaela finally learns the terrible truth about her father. Desperate for answers, Mikaela travels to the institution at Lejnice, where Maager has been held since his trial. But soon afterwards she inexplicably vanishes.

The Strangler's Honeymoon is the penultimate gripping Scandinavian crime thriller in the Van Veeteren series by Håkan Nesser. Desperately lonely, 16-year-old Monica Kammerle has little idea of what she is getting herself into when she begins an affair with her mother's latest partner, the sophisticated Benjamin Kerran.... Months later, when a woman's strangled body is found, the Maardam police must discover who has committed this terrible crime.

A dark and sinister case from the past comes back to haunt Chief Inspector Van Veeteren in the final novel in the Van Veeteren series, The G File by Håkan Nesser. 1987. Verlangan, a former cop turned private detective, is hired by a woman to follow her husband, Jaan 'G' Hennan. A few days later, his client is found dead at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. Maardam police, led by Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, investigate the case.