Backstrom Series

In the middle of an unusually hot Swedish summer, a young woman studying at the Vaxjo Police Academy is brutally murdered. Police Inspector Evert Bäckström is unwillingly drafted in from Stockholm to head up the investigation. Egotistical, vain and utterly prejudiced against everything, Bäckström is a man who has no sense of duty or responsibility, thinks everyone with the exception of himself is an imbecile and is only really capable of warm feelings towards his pet goldfish and the nearest bottle of liquor.

It's the dead of summer in the sleepy town of Växjö when 20-year-old police cadet Linda Wallin is found lying face down in her mother's apartment, brutally murdered and raped. With no clear motive or suspect in sight, a series of bureaucratic mix-ups causes the National Crime Unit to send Bäckström and his team into the countryside to solve the case. The ever-irritable Bäckström leaves his beloved goldfish behind, checks into a local hotel, and begins to reconstruct the night of Linda's murder.

In this second installment of Persson's trilogy of police procedurals featuring the 'small, fat and primitive' Evert Bäckström, the grand master's most appallingly repulsive (and funniest) character is finally given his 15 minutes of fame by way of his patented combination of laziness, luck and an unbelievable sense of timing. A seemingly ordinary murder puzzles Bäckström, who is struggling with strict orders from his doctor to lead a healthier life. His gut feeling proves him right: within days his team has another murder linked to the first on their hands.

When a newspaper delivery boy finds a 68-year-old alcoholic lying dead in his apartment - beaten with a saucepan lid and hammer, and then strangled - everyone expects an open-and-shut murder case, everyone that is but Hawaiian-shirt clad Detective Bäckström who's been assigned to lead the investigation team.