Showing results by author "Leif G.W. Persson" in All Categories

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End is the first novel in a trilogy that is the defining account of the unsolved assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme in 1986 that still haunts the collective Swedish memory. Beginning with the death of an unknown American citizen in Stockholm, Persson slowly unravels the complex web of international espionage, greed, sheer incompetence and a poorly constructed Swedish intelligence force, that in this fiction lead to the murder of the Prime Minister.

In the middle of an unusually hot Swedish summer, a young woman studying at the Vaxjo Police Academy is brutally murdered. Police Inspector Evert Bäckström is unwillingly drafted in from Stockholm to head up the investigation. Egotistical, vain and utterly prejudiced against everything, Bäckström is a man who has no sense of duty or responsibility, thinks everyone with the exception of himself is an imbecile and is only really capable of warm feelings towards his pet goldfish and the nearest bottle of liquor.

It's August 2007, and Lars Martin Johansson, chief of the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Sweden, has opened the files on the unsolved murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme. With his retirement quickly closing in, Johansson forms a new group comprised of a few trustworthy detectives who doggedly wade through mountains of paperwork and pursue new leads in a case that has all but gone cold despite the open wound the assassination has left on the consciousness of Swedish society.

In this second installment of Persson's trilogy of police procedurals featuring the 'small, fat and primitive' Evert Bäckström, the grand master's most appallingly repulsive (and funniest) character is finally given his 15 minutes of fame by way of his patented combination of laziness, luck and an unbelievable sense of timing. A seemingly ordinary murder puzzles Bäckström, who is struggling with strict orders from his doctor to lead a healthier life. His gut feeling proves him right: within days his team has another murder linked to the first on their hands.