The Return

Chief Inspector Van Veeteren knew that murder cases were never as open-and-shut as this one: Janek Mitter woke one morning with a brutal hangover and discovered his wife of three months lying facedown in the bathtub, dead. With only the flimsiest excuse as his defense, he is found guilty of a drunken crime of passion and imprisoned in a mental institution.

Four friends celebrate winning the lottery. Just hours later, one of them - Waldemar Leverkuhn - is found in his home, stabbed to death. With Chief Inspector Van Veeteren on sabbatical, working in a secondhand bookshop, the case is assigned to Inspector Münster. But when another member of the lottery group disappears as well as Leverkuhn's neighbour, Münster appeals to Van Veeteren for assistance.

The Strangler's Honeymoon is the penultimate gripping Scandinavian crime thriller in the Van Veeteren series by Håkan Nesser. Desperately lonely, 16-year-old Monica Kammerle has little idea of what she is getting herself into when she begins an affair with her mother's latest partner, the sophisticated Benjamin Kerran.... Months later, when a woman's strangled body is found, the Maardam police must discover who has committed this terrible crime.

A dark and sinister case from the past comes back to haunt Chief Inspector Van Veeteren in the final novel in the Van Veeteren series, The G File by Håkan Nesser. 1987. Verlangan, a former cop turned private detective, is hired by a woman to follow her husband, Jaan 'G' Hennan. A few days later, his client is found dead at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. Maardam police, led by Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, investigate the case.

A community is left reeling after a teacher - Arnold Maager - is convicted of murdering his female pupil Winnie Maas. It seems the girl had been pregnant with Maager's child. Years later, on her 18th birthday, Maager's daughter Mikaela finally learns the terrible truth about her father. Desperate for answers, Mikaela travels to the institution at Lejnice, where Maager has been held since his trial. But soon afterwards she inexplicably vanishes.