The Fire Engine That Disappeared

The cunning incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment house one cold winter night not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the building’s eleven occupants. And if one of police commissioner Martin Beck’s colleagues hadn’t been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe since - for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain - the fire department didn’t arrive until too late. How could a regulation-sized ladder truck vanish in the center of Stockholm? What, if anything, did the explosion have to do with the peculiar death earlier that day of a 46-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: ‘Martin Beck’? Once again Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo bring to life the familiar team of grudgingly dedicated policemen who assist Martin Beck (now head of Sweden’s homicide bureau) in picking a trail through the intricate underground that connects Stockholm criminals to those on the Continent. No heroes. Beck’s men work hard just getting from one day to the next in a big-city world of evil on every scale. Beck himself, by this book, is a little more accustomed to the intolerable existence he faces: the ashes in his akvavit have settled a bit as his appreciation for the mysteries in his own life heightens, slightly.