Most of the people who usually busied themselves with crime had been forced into inactivity during the last month. So long as the police were on the alert, it was best to lie low. There was not a thief, junkie, pusher, mugger, bootlegger or pimp in the whole of Stockholm who didn't hope the mass murderer would soon be seized so that the police could once more devote their time to Vietnam demonstrators and parking offenders and they themselves could get back to work.
--Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, The Laughing Policeman (Vintage Books, 1970, translated by Alan Blair)
This is the fourth in the Martin Beck series, as Beck and dozens of other policeman try to solve the massacre of nine people on a Stockholm bus. The murder was carefully planned, leading Beck and the others to start investigating the lives of the victims, including a policeman, and if any of them could have been the targets. For a long time they get nowhere, until they discover some photographs that lead Beck to think that the dead policeman, Ake Stenstrom, had been quietly working on a twenty-year-old cold case in order to move up in the ranks. Once Beck goes back to the details of the old case some anomalies appear, including the possible misidentification of a motorcar and a strange note in the pocket of one of the victims on the bus who had been questioned in old case that involved a murdered woman. Beck and his team work long hours and interview many friends of the victims of the bus murder as well as those who had been questioned in the older case. The last words of one of the bus victims, barely understood until they figured out the language he was speaking, also helped in finding the murderer.
Sjowall and Wahloo portray in detail the long hours and tedious interviews of homicide detectives and policemen in general, who often go days before they can spend any time with their families and even when they have a day off may be suddently summoned to a case because there are simply not enough police on the force.
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