Hour of the wolf - Hkan Nesser

In the dead of night, in the pouring rain, a drunk driver smashes his car into a young man. He abandons the body at the side of the road, but the incident will set in motion a chain of events which will change his life forever.

Soon Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, now retired from the Maardam police force, will face his greatest trial yet as someone close to him is, inexplicably, murdered.

Van Veeteren's former colleagues, desperate for answers, struggle to decipher the clues to this appalling crime. But when another body is discovered, it gradually becomes clear that this killer is acting on their own terrifying logic . . .

Hkan Nesser is one of Sweden's most popular crime writers, receiving numerous awards for his novels featuring Inspector Van Veeteren, including the European Crime Fiction Star Award (Ripper Award) 2010/11, the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy Prize (three times) and Scandinavia's Glass Key Award. The Van Veeteren series is published in over 25 countries and has sold over 10 million copies worldwide. Hkan Nesser lives in Gotland with his wife and spends part of each year in the UK.

In addition to the popular Van Veeteren series, his other books include the psychological thriller The Living and the Dead in Winsford and The Barbarotti series.

'Hakan Nesser, the godfather of Swedish crime . His Van Veeteren novels have a puckishness and sprightliness that too often elude his younger, gloomier pretenders . Nesser has thus far only been a minor player in the British Nordic crime scene: Hour of the Wolf should be the book to change that' Metro

'The Swedish novelist Hakan Nesser is in another league, exhibiting a skill and consistency rare in crime fiction. Hour of the Wolf, translated by Laurie Thompson is one of his finest novels, starting with a road accident and unravelling its terrible consequences. The victim is a 16-year-old boy, struck by a car while walking home late at night, and the accident sets in motion a series of murders. One of the victims is related to Nesser's detective, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, who has retired to become an antiquarian bookseller. The ex-policeman's old team rallies to obtain justice for their much-loved former boss in a novel that combines a clever plot with authentic emotion' Sunday Times

'All the tropes of Scandinavian crime: physical and metaphysical gloom, desolate landscapes and circumscribed lives. However, it is a grown-up, rather than a depressing read. The investigating cops are skilfully differentiated and their banter is amusing. As for the plot . it contains enough twists to keep you reading through the Bergmanesque darkness' Mark Sanderson, Evening Standard

'Of the Nordic crime writers currently holding readers' attention in an unbreakable grip, Hkan Nesser is comfortably the most anglocentric. Nesser himself has a notably dry and ironic sense of humour, more redolent of this island than Sweden, and intermittently makes London his home. He also has something in common with another great generator of suspense, Leytonstone-born Alfred Hitchcock: a preoccupation with guilt and the way in which crime draws everyone connected with it into a dark moral miasma - as in the latest book to reach these shores, Hour of the Wolf . . . All this is dispatched with the assurance that readers have come to expect from the author of such quietly compelling crime fiction as The Return and Woman With Birthmark. As before with Nesser, we are reminded of the writer Ruth Rendell in the coolly methodical fashion in which lives are destroyed by a crime, those of both the victims and the perpetrators . . . there is not a single misstep as the grim implications of the narrative are teased out. And - as with Hitchcock - the guilt of a single character becomes a kind of amorphous mass, affecting everyone involved, muddying moral distinctions' Independent

'Nesser, an award-winning writer who has sold millions worldwide, has an easy style which pulls the reader along nicely...Comparisons with other Scandinavian thriller writers don't work as Nesser has a style all his own, making him a writer who needs to be on the bookshelves of all crime fans. And in Van Veeteren he has created a hero who is easy to like' Edinburgh Evening News

'All too chillingly plausible tale' Daily Mail

'If Scandinavian gloom lights your candle, Hkan Nesser's Hour of the Wolf will have you howling with pleasure . . . Desolate landscapes and quirky characters are described with impressive skill' Evening Standard 'Best books for summer 2012'