The Mind’s Eye, by Hakan Nesser

Review

The Mind’s Eye is the first in the Inspector Van Veeteren mystery series.

When Eva Mitter is found drowned in her bathtub, the chief suspect quickly becomes her husband of three months, Janek. With no other viable suspects and Janek’s suspicious behaviour, it looks like and open and shut case. Certainly Inspector Van Veeteren thinks so. After all who could believe Janek’s convenient loss of memory as to what happened that fateful night because he drank too much at dinner?

But when a second murder occurs that is clearly connected to the first, something about Janek’s protestations sets Van Veeteren rethinking the entire case, and before long finds himself involved in one of the darkest cases of his career.

The characters in The Mind’s Eye are interesting. Chief Inspector Van Veeteren has a rather unsettled personal life and an obsession with beating his long-suffering colleague, Inspector Munster, at badminton. Van Veeteren is a man of depth and character, philosophical, with a dry wit, classical tastes, a perceptive eye and a strong moral compass. Rough and grumpy at times, warm at others. There are glimpses into his personal life in this book – his troubled son, and an estranged and confused relationship with his wife. The introspective Van Veeteren has grown cynical over the years, and now he longs for retirement.

Good, smart deduction leads Van Veeteren to suspect that the culprit is one of Mitter’s high school coworkers. Officers spend days questioning potential witnesses and suspects. They try to use logic to narrow the field, but some of their assumptions eliminate too many people.Van Veeteren understands that most of what they do is an utter waste of time. But he needs information so that he can connect the dots. As he tells one of his colleagues, “If there’s anything I’ve learned in this job, it’s that there are more connections in the world than there are particles in the universe…The hard bit is finding the right ones.”

The Mind’s Eye is interesting, entertaining, excellently written and has an intelligent plot, good characters, and plenty of surprises and twists. A good start for a great series!

Links:
Amazon US: Mind’s Eye: An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery (Inspector Van Veeteren Mysteries)
Amazon UK: The Mind’s Eye
Amazon CAN: Minds Eye

Synopsis

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.

But Van Veeteren’s suspicions about the identity of the killer are borne out when Mitter also becomes a murder victim. Now the chief inspector launches a full-scale investigation of the two slayings. But it may only be the unspoken secrets of the dead–revealed in a mysterious letter that Mitter wrote shortly before his death–that will finally allow Van Veeteren to unmask the killer and expose the shocking root of this sordid violence.