The Sword of Justice

Starred review from April 16, 2018
Det. Supt. Evert Bäckström receives the best news of his life at the start of Persson’s riotous third novel featuring the outrageous, libidinous, thoroughly contemptible, yet oddly magnetic Swedish policeman (after He Who Kills the Dragon): his greatest personal and professional enemy, Thomas Eriksson (aka the “Muslim mafia’s favorite lawyer,” according to one evening paper), has been murdered. Bäckström is pleased to visit the crime scene, Eriksson’s opulent country villa, where someone bashed in the victim’s head with a blunt instrument. He’s less happy about investigating the many suspects in the case, which hinges on a Pinocchio-shaped Fabergé music box made as a gift for the son of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, a priceless object that later fell into the hands of Winston Churchill and eventually Vladimir Putin. In the end, Bäckström, whose only friend was his deceased goldfish, Egon, muddles into a crime-solving epiphany. Persson hilariously skewers contemporary police work and society’s corrupted demands on the profession in, as he calls it in an author’s note, this “wicked tale for grown-up children.” Agent: Niclas Salomonsson, Salomonsson Agency (Sweden).

April 15, 2018
More Scandinavian murder mayhem from Swedish novelist/criminologist Persson (The Dying Detective, 2017, etc.).Evert Bäckström lacks the noble mien of Hercule Poirot and the rough chivalry of Philip Marlowe; he's a worldly schlub of large appetites and strong opinions ("carrots and oatbran were almost certainly one contributing fact to why his malnourished and cretinous colleagues fucked up with such depressing regularity") who doesn't lack for prejudices and the ugly language to accompany them. Still, he's been at the detective game for a long time, and even if he likes to hide out in his office with the door closed and a do-not-disturb light, he's actually reasonably good at his job, less briskly efficient than his right-hand man ("who, naturally, was a woman"), but still game to "wield the sword of justice" come Monday morning each week. As the narrative progresses, one week's comparatively mild body count is headed by the murder of an arty aristocrat, illustrating that he who lives by the auction catalog dies by the auction catalog. But that murder has bearing on another, this one of a lawyer with connections to organized crime and the drug trade--and, not coincidentally, to a plot to do away with Bäckström. There's a Maltese falcon in the equation, too, in the form of a music box that has been wandering from living room to living room ever since it slipped out of the possession of "that fat bloke who was always smoking a cigar"--that is, Winston Churchill. Getting to the facts of the matter takes plenty of time, and Persson seems in no hurry to arrive at a conclusion, which, one assumes, is a reflection of the business-as-usual slow unfolding of criminal investigations, particularly ones as tangled as this, in which one bit of bad behavior leads to another.His detective isn't the most pleasant of company, but Persson's wry commentaries on contemporary Swedish life make for pleasing entertainment.

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May 1, 2018
In his third novel featuring Stockholm DS Evert B�ckstr�m (following He Who Kills the Dragon, 2015), Persson expertly weaves gripping crime fiction from a Romanov heirloom, a Pinocchio tale, a cabal of septuagenarian gangsters, and B�ckstr�m's comically crass inner dialogue. B�ckstr�m is leading the investigation into gangland attorney Thomas Eriksson's murder, which is a head-scratcher from the start. The physical evidence shows that after Eriksson died, his killers returned, killed his dog, and further bludgeoned his body. The only witness is a cab driver who spotted a biker-gang enforcer, Angel Garcia Gomez, leaving Eriksson's house in the early morning after the murder. Of course, Gomez has an airtight alibi, and the witness disappears. B�ckstr�m's crack team isn't giving him much reason for hope, either; his new recruit is determined to link Eriksson's murder to a pensioner's misdemeanor case of rabbit neglect and an aristocrat's assault with an auction catalog. Still, between naps, B�ckstr�m somehow solves the case and bolsters his media-darling status. There's more wit here than in many Scandinavian crime novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)