If are a fan PD James, Ian Rankin and Henning Mankell, I have good news! Hakan Nesser's DI Van Veeteren and his team of police detectives solve gripping mysteries in four excellently written novels. The Maardam police department exists in a Northern European area of fictional place-names with bitterly cold, snowy winters and rainy, windy autumns and springs wrapped around all-too-brief summers. 
Van Veeteren himself reminds me a great deal of Mankell's Kurt Wallander in that he seems perpetually grumpy and pessimistic and has a fondness for classical music. His colleagues are mostly well-rounded but straight out of Central Casting: the family man balancing private life with an extremely demanding profession, the single woman with a biological clock ticking loudly, various detectives with particular idiosyncracies and variable work ethics, and the Police Chief whose presence only slows the detectives' progress and reminds them of the ubiquitous red tape. Where Nesser shines is in the mysteries themselves. They are uniquely designed with plausible red herrings and moments that will stun the most veteran of mystery readers. While Van Veeteren's intuition and uncanny ability to recognize a murderer when he sees one are touted throughout the novels, the stories do not rely on anything but hard-won evidence and the occasional (though believable) lucky break.
In Mind's Eye, the Maardam team are presented with a murder that practically solves itself, at first. After an alcoholic blackout, a husband awakens to find his wife dead. He's going down for the crime without a hitch, until he is murdered in custody.
Van Veeteren has to solve a murder in The Return where the victim is left without most of the body parts a detective traditionally relies on for identification.
The axe murder of an ex-con and then a wealthy business man completely confound the Maardam team in Borkmann's Point until the gaps in the evidence point directly to the murderer.
I'm nearly half-way through Woman With Birthmark, so you'll just have to read that one yourself to get the story. I will say that it is my favorite of them all, so grab a copy and see what you think!
Van Veeteren himself reminds me a great deal of Mankell's Kurt Wallander in that he seems perpetually grumpy and pessimistic and has a fondness for classical music. His colleagues are mostly well-rounded but straight out of Central Casting: the family man balancing private life with an extremely demanding profession, the single woman with a biological clock ticking loudly, various detectives with particular idiosyncracies and variable work ethics, and the Police Chief whose presence only slows the detectives' progress and reminds them of the ubiquitous red tape. Where Nesser shines is in the mysteries themselves. They are uniquely designed with plausible red herrings and moments that will stun the most veteran of mystery readers. While Van Veeteren's intuition and uncanny ability to recognize a murderer when he sees one are touted throughout the novels, the stories do not rely on anything but hard-won evidence and the occasional (though believable) lucky break. In Mind's Eye, the Maardam team are presented with a murder that practically solves itself, at first. After an alcoholic blackout, a husband awakens to find his wife dead. He's going down for the crime without a hitch, until he is murdered in custody.
Van Veeteren has to solve a murder in The Return where the victim is left without most of the body parts a detective traditionally relies on for identification. 
The axe murder of an ex-con and then a wealthy business man completely confound the Maardam team in Borkmann's Point until the gaps in the evidence point directly to the murderer. I'm nearly half-way through Woman With Birthmark, so you'll just have to read that one yourself to get the story. I will say that it is my favorite of them all, so grab a copy and see what you think!
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