Mind's Eye

An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery

By: Håkan Nesser, Laurie Thompson - translator

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©1993 Original material by Håkan Nesser. Originally published in Sweden as Det grovmaskiga nätet by Albert Bonniers Förlag AB, Stockholm. Translation © 2008 by Laurie Thompson. Recorded by arrangement with Pantheon, an imprint of the Knopf Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. (P)2011 HighBridge Company

Critic reviews

"Snappish, sardonic, unsentimental, depressed, and quite possibly psychic, Van Veeteren is the most appealingly unlovable hero since TV's crabby physician House." ( O, The Oprah Magazine)

"In a class of its own.... This stunning novel by one of Sweden's foremost crime writers might have been written as a script for Alfred Hitchcock. ( The Sunday Times)

" Mind's Eye satisfies on every level. It is an intelligently written, cleverly plotted tale, populated with believable characters.... Nesser was superb right out of the gate." ( BookPage)

Disappointing in every way

I don't know how Nesser has won awards for his mysteries (including this one) if this first in the series is anything to go by. I'm a huge fan of Scandinavian crime writers (Mankell, Sjowall and Wahloo) but this one left me cold. The author "cheats" by simply withholding information so that only the detective (who is poorly developed as a character) knows stuff and we as the audience are just told that he has figured it out. For me, the point of mysteries is 1) getting to know the characters and 2) following along and trying to solve the crime myself. This book allowed for neither.

The narrator, Simon Vance, also left a great deal to be desired. So many wonderful narrators out there, but this fellow really fell flat - poor at nuancing various characters so you know who is speaking, and fairly expressionless all around. Nesser and Vance are a particularly bad combo because Nesser has the irritating habit of starting chapters with "he", leaving the reader with no idea which "he" in the story is meant. Add to that Vance's inability to voice multiple distinctive characters and the result is a lot of confusion. After a while I stopped caring. If you haven't already, go for the Henning Mankell series, or the marvelous early books by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, from which Mankell borrows *heavily.*

tedious. characterization poorly developed

difficult to keep listening as characters poorly defined. plot starts and moves like molasses...found it difficult to enjoy

Can't stand listening to court cases

I couldn't get more than an hour into the book before I simply couldn't listen to it anymore. It pretty much starts out with how the justice system works with a court case and I am a hopeless idealist so I cannot tolerate it when the justice system is warped the way it is so I simply could not listen to this book.