The Return by Hakan Nesser

I had never heard of Hakan Nesser before, but decided to give it a try when I found The Return in the English bookstore in Yerevan. I have been craving for some good mysteries or other not too heavy reading material lately. Maybe that’s summer kicking in. Or the scales are just going in the other direction now, after heaving read more serious books and lots of non-fiction in the last year or so. The Return is the third in a series of mysteries with Chief Inspector Van Veeteren as the main character. The first two books in the series, Mind’s Eye and Borkmann’s Point are also available in English, but The Return is perfectly readable as a stand-alone book. Nesser is a Swedish author who writes mysteries in the tradition of Henning Mankell, though Nesser gives Van Veeteren and the members of his police team less personal background than Mankell does.

Van Veeteren is a fairly typical fictional Chief Inspector:a  bit of a loner; divorced with two grown-up children, one of whom is in prison; doesn’t seem to have too many friends; enjoys a beer frequently; and he likes poetry and opera. In The Return, Van Veeteren spends part of his time in hospital undergoing surgery in which a malignant tumor is being removed. This is pretty much all we find out about Van Veeteren the person.

One day a body is found in the forest. The body has been dead for months, and because the hands, feet and head are missing, identification is difficult. The body turns out to be that of Leopold Verhaven, a former track-star, who spent 24 years in prison for the murders of two of his lovers. He was murdered shortly after his release from prison. When the investigation into Verhaven’s murder raises doubts about the way the two trials were handled and it becomes clear that Verhaven might actually have been innocent, the case is closed under pressure “from above”. If two of the largest murdercases in the country turn out to have been one huge miscarriage of justice, that would surely not reflect well on both the police force and the legal system in the country. Van Veetern, being on sick leave after his surgery, nonetheless decides to find the truth on his own.

The last part of the book especially raises some interesting questions about morality, about whether under certain circumstances it is right to take the law into one’s own hands.

The one thing that bothered me about the book is that it is set in a fictional northern European country, a mixture of Germany, Sweden and Holland I suppose. It took some time for me to realize that the book is set in a fictional country. Well okay, that in itself didn’t bother me so much, what distracted me were the names of people, places, streets, newspapers. They were all a mixture of German, Dutch and Swedish with the odd Eastern-European name thrown in. For some reason this kept distracting me right until the end and I kept trying to find traces of each country in the story. There is not really any reason it should be so distracting, but it was for me. I am not entirely sure, that this fictional setting was necessary altogether; for me it didn’t add anything to the story. I think this story would have worked just as well if it were set in a real country, southern Sweden, Denmark, the northern part of Germany.

The Return is a fairly slow-paced and straightforward mystery, well-written. Despite the one big minus, I enjoyed it, the story drew me in quickly and I read it in one day. I wouldn’t mind reading any other of Nesser’s books if I come across them. I do think The Return lacks something compared to Henning Mankell’s Wallander-series, but if you enjoy Scandinavian mysteries, The Return is well worth trying.

You can read an excerpt from The Return here.