Thomas Teal

"This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland."--Publisher's description.

"Seventh novel in the Martin Beck mystery series, " together known as "The story of crime." "The gruesome murder of a police captain in his hospital room reveals the unsavory history of a man who spent forty years practicing a horrible blend of strongarm police work and sheer brutality. Martin Beck and his colleagues feverishly comb Stockholm for the murderer, a demented and deadly rifleman, who has plans for even more chaos. As the tension builds...

In the penultimate installment of this masterful crime-fiction series, Martin Beck, now head of the National Murder Squad, is called in to a sleepy part of the countryside to investigate a woman's disappearance. What Beck doesn't know is that the woman has already been murdered, her body dumped in a swamp. At the same time, a midnight shoot-out between three cops and two teenage boys ends with one policeman dead.

As Beck and his partner,

...