Cop Killer by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall

 The great increase in the number of violent over the last decade is, in my opinion, largely due to the fact that policemen invariably carry firearms.  It is a known fact, and can be demonstrated with statistics from many other countries, that the incidence of violent crime immediately increases when the police force sets, as it were, a bad example.

--from Detective Lennart Kollberg's resignation letter in Cop Killer by Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall (Random House, 1975, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal)

This is the ninth (of ten) Martin Beck series by Wahloo and Sjowall.  Beck is continuing to be annoyed by the incompetent police hierarchy and the slacking patrolmen of Stockholm's police force.  Cop Killer is not mainly about a policeman's death but about Beck's attempt to find the killer of Sigbrit Mard in Malmo.  It happened that the cop killer had stolen a car that turned out to belong to Sigbrit Mard's killer and Beck was able to put the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle, even though the Malmo police had already arrested another man for the crime. And the cop killer was caught only because his girlfriend had accidentally given away his location after he had escaped from a botched attempt to capture him.

The whole story is as fatalistic as a Fritz Lang film and suggests that the police in Sweden are only able to catch violent criminals with the help of luck and the ratiocination of Martin Beck of The National Homicide squad in Stockholm.  Wahloo and Sjowall continued to effectively combine fascinating police manhunts with withering criticism of Swedish society in the 1970's, much of which continues to be valid and relevant today, not only for Sweden but for our own country.