Hour of the Wolf

Håkan Nesser is one of Sweden's most popular crime writers, receiving numerous awards for his novels featuring Inspector Van Veeteren, including the European Crime Fiction Star Award (Ripper Award) 2010/11, the Swedish Crime Writers' Academy Prize (three times) and Scandinavia's Glass Key Award. The Van Veeteren series is published in over twenty-five countries and has sold over ten million copies worldwide. Håkan Nesser lives in Gotland with his wife and spends part of each year in the UK.

In addition to the popular Van Veeteren series, his other books include the psychological thriller The Living and the Dead in Winsford and The Barbarotti series.

'Hakan Nesser, the godfather of Swedish crime ... His Van Veeteren novels have a puckishness and sprightliness that too often elude his younger, gloomier pretenders ... Nesser has thus far only been a minor player in the British Nordic crime scene: Hour of the Wolf should be the book to change that' Metro 'The Swedish novelist Hakan Nesser is in another league, exhibiting a skill and consistency rare in crime fiction. Hour of the Wolf, translated by Laurie Thompson is one of his finest novels, starting with a road accident and unravelling its terrible consequences. The victim is a 16-year-old boy, struck by a car while walking home late at night, and the accident sets in motion a series of murders. One of the victims is related to Nesser's detective, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, who has retired to become an antiquarian bookseller. The ex-policeman's old team rallies to obtain justice for their much-loved former boss in a novel that combines a clever plot with authentic emotion' Sunday Times 'All the tropes of Scandinavian crime: physical and metaphysical gloom, desolate landscapes and circumscribed lives. However, it is a grown-up, rather than a depressing read. The investigating cops are skilfully differentiated and their banter is amusing. As for the plot ... it contains enough twists to keep you reading through the Bergmanesque darkness' Mark Sanderson, Evening Standard 'Of the Nordic crime writers currently holding readers' attention in an unbreakable grip, Hakan Nesser is comfortably the most anglocentric. Nesser himself has a notably dry and ironic sense of humour, more redolent of this island than Sweden, and intermittently makes London his home. He also has something in common with another great generator of suspense, Leytonstone-born Alfred Hitchcock: a preoccupation with guilt and the way in which crime draws everyone connected with it into a dark moral miasma -- as in the latest book to reach these shores, Hour of the Wolf ... All this is dispatched with

'Hakan Nesser, the godfather of Swedish crime ... His Van Veeteren novels have a puckishness and sprightliness that too often elude his younger, gloomier pretenders ... Nesser has thus far only been a minor player in the British Nordic crime scene: Hour of the Wolf should be the book to change that' Metro