The Dying Detective

March 27, 2017
At the start of Persson’s cleverly plotted police procedural, Lars Martin Johansson, a celebrated Stockholm investigator who’s now retired and living in the country, suffers a stroke and is taken to the local hospital, where his doctor, Ulrika Stenholm, tells him about an unsolved 25-year-old murder. Ulrika’s father, a retired vicar, told her shortly before his recent death that he once took confession from someone who knew who had kidnapped and killed nine-year-old Yasmine Ermegan, the daughter of two Iranian immigrants. After recovering, Johansson—unofficially—investigates, with the help of his former partner, Jarnebring. The initial case was botched back in 1985; thanks to a law abolishing the statute of limitations, it can’t be prosecuted now. Johansson demonstrates real brilliance in identifying the killer, but equally impressive is what he does with the knowledge. Persson (Free Falling, as if in a Dream) provides plenty of domestic details and lengthy asides, which lend interest but slow the narrative. Agent: Niclas Salomonsson, Salomonsson Agency (Sweden).

April 1, 2017
Swedish mysterian Persson (Linda, As in the Linda Murder, 2016, etc.) brings a memorable creation to a close in this pensive whodunit.Lars Martin Johansson, a CSI detective who can "see around corners," figures in other books by Persson, especially Free Falling, as If in a Dream (2014). Here, at the outset of a yarn whose very title tells the reader that things will not go well for the Swedish Sherlock, Johansson has been discovered slumped behind a steering wheel, the victim of a stroke. His doctors warn him that not only is his brain bleeding, but he's also got heart problems, dietary troubles, and other woes. "If you don't change your way of life, and I mean radically, then you'll die," one doctor warns. Casually, she then spins out a little tale from the cold-case file, one involving her late father, who--Sweden being a small country--connected at an oblique angle with the rape and murder of a young girl three decades earlier. Johansson cannot remember the details, and it bothers him: "He could live with the fact that he had forgotten the name of his only son's second wife," writes Persson, but not that he now cannot retrieve young Yasmine Ermegan from the encyclopedia of crime that had been his head. He reconstructs the case, filling in detail by detail with the aid of an odd assemblage of allies and newfangled DNA evidence. There aren't many red herrings: the real mystery in this well-paced though brooding story is what to do with what Johansson uncovers about the "perfectly ordinary, decent Swede" to whom all the evidence points. Indeed, the crux of the story lies in Johansson's wrestling with an appropriate solution to a crime that, incredibly, is fast slipping to the other side of the statute of limitations: does he let the bad guy get away, or does he take justice into his own hands? A knotty, sinuous story that leads to a hard-won resolution--and a decidedly conclusive end.

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Starred review from April 15, 2017
Persson is Sweden's most renowned psychological profiler and considered the country's foremost expert on crime. He has authored a number of police procedurals centered in Stockholm that feature an ensemble cast with characters from the National Criminal Police who come and go in the novels, much like Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad detectives. The Dying Detective centers on Lars Martin Johansson, a living legend, the man who could see around corners. Now retired, he has suffered a stroke. His doctor inadvertently engages him in a cold case, the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl. He undertakes an investigation that starts out (a la Josephine Tey) in his hospital bed and then continues at home, much to the dismay of his wife and the delight of his associates. A brilliant police procedural unfolds within which Johansson must confront his mortality: What sort of life is it if you're just counting down the days to the end? Johansson manages to solve the 25-year-old crime within a month despite his fading memory and failing body, even though scores of police officers worked on it for several years. In the hands of a lesser storyteller, this novel, which takes more than 400 pages to tell, would collapse under the staggering amount of dialogue and detail, but, in Persson's telling, it is almost impossible to put down. An absolutely masterful crime novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)