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"Its August 2007, and Lars Martin Johansson, chief of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Sweden, is determined once again to reopen the dusty files on the unsolved murder of Prime Minister Palme. With his retirement quickly approaching, Johansson forms a new group, comprised of a few trustworthy detectives who doggedly wade through mountains of paperwork and pursue new leads in a case that has all but gone cold despite the open wound the assassination has left on the consciousness of Swedish society. But the closer the group gets to the truth, the more Johansson compromises the greater good for personal gain, becoming a pawn in the private vendetta of a shady political spin doctor."--Dust jacket.… (more)
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. ( )
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.
Olof Palme, sa chefen för Rikskriminalpolisen, Lars Martin Johansson. Är det namnet bekant för herrskapet?
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Oavsett om sanningen är absolut eller relativ och helt bortsett från att många av oss ständigt söker den, är den till sist ändå förborgad för nästan alla av oss. I regel av nödvändighet och om inte annat av omsorg om dem som ändå inte skulle förstå.
"Its August 2007, and Lars Martin Johansson, chief of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Sweden, is determined once again to reopen the dusty files on the unsolved murder of Prime Minister Palme. With his retirement quickly approaching, Johansson forms a new group, comprised of a few trustworthy detectives who doggedly wade through mountains of paperwork and pursue new leads in a case that has all but gone cold despite the open wound the assassination has left on the consciousness of Swedish society. But the closer the group gets to the truth, the more Johansson compromises the greater good for personal gain, becoming a pawn in the private vendetta of a shady political spin doctor."--Dust jacket.
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From the back cover of the Rivages/Thriller edition (2009):
Lars Martin Johansson, ancien "enquêteur légendaire" désormais haut responsable de la police suédoise, décide de rouvrir discrètement l'enquête sur l'affaire la plus célèbre du pays, jamais élucidée : le meurtre du Premier ministre social-démocrate Olof Palme, en 1986. Ses collaborateurs Anna Holt, Jan Lewin et Lisa Mattei s'attaquent donc aux montagnes de documents accumulés depuis vingt ans, sans trop oser croire qu'ils pourront en tirer quelque chose de nouveau. N'ont-ils pas déjà été maintes fois épluchés ? Par où commencer ?
Car paradoxalement, c'est cette quantité faramineuse de données qui, ajoutée aux égarements de la police à l'époque, a très vite torpillé l'enquête. Comment s'étonner dès lors du développement de toutes sortes de rumeurs plus ou moins vraisemblables ? Ce qui de prime abord pouvait ressembler à un simple meurtre crapuleux se complique singulièrement du fait de la personnalité d'Olof Palme : son courage, sa politique étrangère, ses orientations résolument progressistes lui avaient valu de puissants ennemis, en Suède comme à l'étranger. Et comment expliquer toutes les incohérences, pour ne pas dire pire, qui ont dès le début marqué "l'affaire Palme" ?
)
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4
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. (