Yesterday I read Roseanna, the first in a series of Swedish police procedurals written by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.  Featuring the depressed but motivated Martin Beck as the homicide investigator who works doggedly, patiently, and stubbornly, this book provides a steady feed of the investigative steps, lucky breaks, and dead-ends that make up a murder investigation.

Beck is brought in to find the culprit behind the murder of a young woman left naked, sexually abused, and dead in the waters of Lake Vattern (Sweden’s second largest lake and Europe’s fifth largest).  The body is found by a dredging bucket working the locks: “[a] white, naked arm stuck out of the bucket’s jaw.”

There are no immediate suspects, the body itself without identification for weeks.  Was she a passenger on one of the many vessels traversing the lake?  Was she killed onshore and thrown into the water off the banks along the locks? Is she Swedish or one foreigner from the hundreds of tourists traversing the lake in the past week?  Slowly, very slowly, the facts start to accumulate, the woman’s name, then her personality, and then her itinerary; the location of her murder is narrowed, the field of suspects identified, the circle around the perpetrator defined, then tightened. No detail in this book stands alone, each is uncovered, displayed, then fit into the puzzle of the crime and its final solution.

The final hunt provides the only true excitement in this book  — and the only time when Beck breaks from procedure and rules — and yet Roseanna is riveting throughout, and satisfying at the end.