van Veeteren: The Inspector and Silence, by Hakan Nesser

The Inspector and Silence is the fifth novel in the Van Veeteren series by Hakan Nesser. It is a great, very interesting and quite philosophical crime fiction novel, where the Chief Inspector has much to ponder, both related to the case at hand, and other, more private matters.

Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is a man guided by intuition, a man who never allows an investigation to interrupt his enjoyment of good beer, wine or food. He is a man who firmly believes he can solve every and any case laid before him. There are no coincidences, and all it comes down to is finding a way to the solution.

When we meet up with the pondering, chess playing inspector in The Inspector and Silence, he is about to make two huge decisions: The first is whether to go to Crete on a summer vacation. The second is about his job: Should he quit and buy a partnership in a used book store in the neighborhood?

His pondering is disturbed when the police receive a call from Sergeant Merwin Kluuge up in the beautiful forested lake-town of Sorbinowo. Kluuge’s tranquil existence has been shattered by an anonymous woman reporting the disappearance of a girl from the summer camp of a religious sect calling themselves Pure Life. The chief inspector agrees to investigate the case, and heads off in his car to the small town of Sorbinowo.

However, initially the slow-moving investigation by the vastly talented Chief Inspector quickly runs into a wall. When he visits the Pure Life camp, he is met with a wall of silence. The strange priest-like figure who leads the sect – Oscar Yellineck – claims that they have no missing girl – all are accounted for and present. So do all the other participants.

Then the anonymous woman calls again. This time she tells the police the location of the body of a dead girl. When the police find the thirteen year old girl, she has been tortured, raped, murdered and left naked in the forest.

But things do not quite add up: The dead girl is one of the girls Van Veeteren met when he visited the camp. Is there another dead girl somewhere? Who is the anonymous woman? How did she know about the body? And – as one more of the girls are found in the same condition: How can the police stop the killings?

Everywhere Van Veeteren turns, there is silence – the members of the sect will not talk. And nobody else seems to know anything. Finally Van Veeteren is forced to draw the conclusion that in order to solve this disturbing case, with all its silence and very few clues, he will have to once more rely on his intuition. And so he heads out, following his intuition, to solve the case.

All the books in the Van Veeteren series are excellent. The Inspector and Silence perhaps even more so than the others. There is something about the quiet way this book is written, and the way this contrasts to the quite brutal case, that is very fascinating to me. This is one of my personal favorites in the series.  Also, it is outstandingly plotted and very suspenseful,  as well as humorous and superbly written.

Links to Hakan Nesser’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN