"The irascible, obdurate, and very thirsty. Detective Superintendent Evert Bäckström of the National Murder Squad returns in a new novel from the reigning master of Scandinavian fiction. It<U+2019>s the dead of summer in the sleepy town of Växjö when twenty-year-old police cadet Linda Wallin is found lying facedown in her mother<U+2019>s apartment, brutally murdered and raped. With no clear motive or suspect in sight, a series of bureaucratic mix-ups causes the National Crime Unit to send Bäckström and his team into the countryside to solve the case. The ever-irritable Bäckström leaves his beloved goldfish behind, checks into a local hotel, and begins to reconstruct the night of Linda<U+2019>s murder. But with more than a few bottles in tow, and a constantly growling stomach to look after, things don<U+2019>t go so well, and Bäckström has to rely on the help of his colleagues to solve the crime--no matter how angry that makes him."-- From publisher.