Woman With Birthmark by Hakan Nesser

From the paperback:  A young woman shivers in the December cold as her mother's body is laid to rest in a cemetery.

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 in which 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.

Four names on a list.  The only thing they have in common is that someone calls them in the night and plays the same piece of music, music from the past which has now caught up with them, in the form of a woman with a birthmark.

Chief Inspector Van Veeteren and his team must dig far back into each man's past - but with few clues at each crime scene, can they find the killer before anyone else dies?  And as Van Veeteren muses on the complexity of the emerging puzzle, it falls to someone else to provide the first key insight.

About the author:  Hakan Nesser was awarded the 1993 Swedish Crime Writers' Academy Prize for new authors for his novel The Wide-Meshed Net;  he received the best novel award in 1994 for Borkmann's Point and in 1996 for Woman with a Birthmark (2009).  In 1999 he was awarded the Crime Writers of Scandinavia's Glass Key Award for the best crime novel of the year for Carambole (Swedish, 1999).  Nesser was born in Sweden and has been a resident of London since 2008.  More information on www.nesser.se

Woman With Birthmark (2009) is the fourth book in the Chief Inspector Van Veeteren mystery series set in Sweden and is translated to the English by Laurie Thompson.  Laurie Thompson is a British academic and translator noted for his translations of Swedish literature into the English.  He is the former editor of the Swedish Book Review and a former lecturer.

Rating:  5/5