Roseanna (Martin Beck, #1) in Around the World in 80 Books

May 27, 2017 Judy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: european-reading-challeng

A woman's body is found in a canal by a dredger, but her identity is unknown. Quiet, unhappy police inspector Martin Beck becomes increasingly obsessed with the case, determined to find out who the woman was and to track down her killer. The book is gripping, written in a pared-down style which avoids unnecessary detail. Nevertheless, it creates the atmosphere both of the small Swedish town where the crime is discovered and of the national homicide department in Stockholm where Beck and his team ...more

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Jun 23, 2019 Steve rated it it was amazing

Shelves: crime-mystery-noir, favorites

Might be the best police procedural I've ever read. Roseanna is the first of the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo. I generally frown at collaborative efforts, but this one worked to perfection. It hooks you with its first sentence:

They found the corpse on the eighth of July just after 3 o'clock in the afternoon. It was fairly well intact and couldn't have been lying in the water very long.

And so begins the meticulous accretion of detail that is hardly dry, and often suggestive of d ...more

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Mar 09, 2018 Tanya rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: format-audiobook, 2018

I would read another book by these authors. I actually liked the slower pacing as it seems more realistic than more recent books in terms of uncovering the details of the murder mystery. I had picked this one up because of the PopSugar reading challenge category of “Nordic Noir.” Pleasant surprise for me as I am not a diehard mystery fan.

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