The lying detective
expensive Hastens bed — a very dirty cop in a high position of power.
Backstrom has gotten that far by having solved some of the country’s most difficult and violent crimes.
This has made him some enemies, among them the surviving brother of two Iranian terrorists he shot in one of his most highly publicized exploits, but it’s made him famous.
People recognize Backstrom on the street because they’ve seen him on TV, expounding (and at times exaggerating) his methods and successes.
He meets his match — almost — in his right-hand man, who happens to be a woman, Detective Inspector Annika “Anchor” Carlsson.
She a smart, very tough lesbian, “a terrifying figure who looked as if she spent most of her time in the gym down in the basement of the Solna police station. Probably in other, more nocturnal basements as well.”
Mr. Persson can relate the most horrifying events and make you laugh throughout his descriptions. Backstrom’s cynical observations of people and events around him are so outrageously off the mark that we start to see things his way.
This 700-page serio-comic saga begins on a day that “even though it was a Monday and he had been woken in the middle of the night … Backstrom would always think of it as the best day of his life.”
The duty officer with Solna Police tells him that Thomas Eriksson, a renowned Mafia lawyer and defender of the guilty, has been murdered. Backstrom’s joy is mitigated, however, when he’s appointed chief investigator on the case.
The victim was bludgeoned by a blunt instrument and also stabbed, although there is minimal blood on the scene; there’s evidence of shots having been fired; and someone has defecated on Eriksson’s sofa.
The list of people who might have had a motive to kill the crooked lawyer is staggering, and a thug who appears to be the most likely suspect has a rock-solid alibi.
But Backstom’s actual investigation doesn’t even begin until page 100.
The author sets the scene with detailed descriptions of surrounding events, sketches of individual characters, of their thoughts and how they interact with each other.
Backstrom enlists the aid of some of his sources, who turn out to be at least as revolting as the Mafia folk involved with the late lawyer Eriksson and his vicious, uncooperative surviving partners in the firm.
Matters are further complicated when a crony of the king is beaten up in the parking lot of the Royal Palace by suspects in the Eriksson case.
The Swedish Press is rabid for the story, and Backstrom plays one newspaper against the other by promising information — which may not necessarily be the truth — to reporters from each.
Art theft plays a large part in Mr. Persson’s prolix, multifaceted plot.
Several boxes were seen to have been delivered to or removed from Ericksson’s house on the night of the murder, and their provenance — a word Backstrom can neither pronounce nor understand — goes back as far as Tsarist Russia and is as far ranging as the house of Winston Churchill.
Which brings us to Pinocchio, in the form of an invaluable Faberge music box that has the music coming from the boy’s expanding nose in lieu of a flute.
That magnificent objet d’art becomes the central object in the Eriksson case, its ultimate fate more significant than the life or death of the man himself.
Mr. Persson uses the music box, along with historical events around it and the story of Pinocchio as told by the 18th-century Italian novelist Carlo Collodi, as a metaphor for all the greed, falsehoods and other man-made woes that persist in the troubled world of 21st-century Europe.