The Department of Sensitive Crimes

November 1, 2018

Wouldn't it be just like the author of the "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" mysteries to offer a gentle parody of the Scandinavian noir defining the crime fiction landscape? Led by Ulf Varg, who considers his cases even more important than his dog's happiness, the Malmö Police's Department of Sensitive Crimes considers a back-of-the-knee stabbing, an imaginary boyfriend's disappearance, and possibly supernatural incursions at the local spa.

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February 1, 2019
The chronicler of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (The Colors of All the Cattle, 2018, etc.) and 44 Scotland Street (A Time of Love and Tartan, 2018, etc.) takes on Nordic noir. Guess who comes out on top.The staff of Malmö's Sensitive Crimes Department are pretty sensitive themselves. Ulf Varg worries what sorts of life choices will be left to him once he turns 40. Anna Bengsdotter, married to an anaesthetist, is secretly in love with Ulf, and he with her. Carl Holgersson shoulders most of the squad's actual work out of a cheerful sense of duty. Clerical assistant Erik Nykvist fishes whenever he can and dreams of his retirement, when he expects to fish even more. The group is evidently assigned to investigate crimes too marginal and quirky for anyone else in law enforcement. Why would someone stab market trader Malte Gustafsson painfully but ineffectually behind his knee? Has university student Bim Sundström's boyfriend gone to the North Pole, as she claims, or has she actually done away with him? (Not-really-a-spoiler alert: She's made him up in response to her chums' nonstop questions about her love life.) And why has someone launched a social media attack that seems intended to put the spa run by Police Commissioner Felix Ahlström's cousin out of business? Tearing himself from the side of Marten, the beloved poodle mix he's taught to cope with his deafness by lip-reading, Ulf and his cohort reluctantly partner with uniformed officer Blomquist to bring the parties involved to justice.Fans of the bestselling author's long-running franchises won't be surprised by the two most distinctive features of the gravely waggish department's caseload: The mysteries seem both utterly inconsequential and quietly provocative, and they have long tails that continue to flop around even after they're nominally solved.

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Starred review from February 15, 2019
McCall Smith, famed for his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, set in Botswana, now extends his gift for comic situations and insightful commentary to a projected series set in Sweden? Scandi-Lite, his publisher has dubbed it, in contrast to the bleakness of Scandinavian noir, but the hook sells McCall Smith short. While there's a great deal of humor here, this isn't as "lite," say, as cozy series set in a knitting shop. It's true that the Department of Sensitive Crimes is a catchall agency for crimes that the police in Sweden's Criminal Investigation Authority consider either too minor, too weird, or too annoying to deal with. But, as in the No. 1 Ladies' series, McCall Smith uses these cases to shine a revealing light on human nature, including the foibles and heartaches of the investigators. The department is headed by Ulf Varg (both names mean wolf in Swedish), who is a bit of a lone wolf himself. Ulf and his investigators in Malm�, the third largest city in Sweden, investigate three sensitive cases over the course of the novel: the stabbing in the knee of a market vendor; the disappearance and suspected murder of an imaginary boyfriend; and various sightings (and hearings) of a werewolf at a Scandinavian spa. The second case is especially fascinating, showing how a lie can expand. Detective Varg promises to be a complex series character, and the department itself looks certain to deliver more oddball yet poignant cases.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)