The joy of the new...

I love that feeling you get when you read something by an author, who you've never read before, and you know that this is going to be the beginning of a long and happy relationship. This is just how I felt only a few pages into Borkmann's Point: An Inspector van Veeteren Mystery by Hakan Nesser.

I enjoy crime fiction anyway, and have become a big fan of Eurocops, but had never heard of Nesser, who has only fairly recently been published in the UK, although his books have been available on the continent since the early 1990s. He's a really fun writer. The crime was well plotted, I spotted the murderer very early on - but that's not really the point. In the best crime fiction who the bad guy is is important, but it's not as important as how the whole novel hangs together. This is a pretty clever novel, all the clues are there to enable you to find the murderer, although I still wasn't entirely clear at the end how the detective had arrived there, although I knew how I had!

Nesser, as a fellow Swede, is inevitably going to be compared to Henning Mankell, but Van Veeteren, his detective, is very different from Wallander. There was a much lighter touch, and although the crime itself was horrendous, the book had some lovely laugh out loud moments. Nesser's style is much more akin to Andrea Camilleri with the odd hint of Georges Simenon. He is an author, who I am much looking forward to reading again, and again....