The Inspector and Silence--An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery

Starred review from April 4, 2011
Nesser's fine fourth Insp. Van Veeteren mystery (after 2009's Woman with a Birthmark) finds the crime-weary detective teetering on the brink of retirement while sweltering through a brutal case of rape and murder at a camp run by a religious group, the Pure Life (aka the "sex sect"), for adolescent girls. Van Veeteren immediately suspects the sinister cult leader, Oscar Yellinek, of killing first one, then another of his eerily silent charges, but he himself faces the real mystery of this disturbing parable of good and evil: how long will Van Veeteren, "spoiled over the years" by human inhumanity, be able to stand the desperately delicate balance of his chosen work, where he must constantly enter the malicious "heart of darkness"? As Van Veeteren slowly reconstructs these crimes, he also wrestles with the dilemma central to Nesser's police procedurals: the necessity of protecting evildoers until justice can be done.

If you are not already a Nesser fan, this title is not the place to start. Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is called to a scenic lakeside village to help solve an alleged murder at the summer encampment of a cult called The Pure Life. It's impossible to know if the fault lies with the writer or the translation, but the prose is repetitive, reflexively and tediously ironic, and the plotting seems obvious and thin. Indeed, much of it consists of the various investigators reflecting on what we already know and concluding that it is awful, awful. Simon Vance does his usual attentive, elegant, and skillful job of narrating, but even he can't do much with such enervated material. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine