The Laughing Policeman

On a cold and rainy Stockholm night, nine bus riders are gunned down by an unknown assassin. The press, anxious for an explanation for the seemingly random crime, quickly dubs him a madman. But Superintendent Martin Beck of the Stockholm Homicide Squad suspects otherwise. This apparently motiveless killer has managed to target one of Beck2s best detectives--and he, surely, would not have been riding that lethal bus without a reason, Beck retraces his steps and chases year-old clues to a crime long thought unsolvable.

'This is not a romance - I have too often faced the music of life to the tune of hardship to waste time in snivelling and gushing over fancies and dreams; neither is it a novel, but simply a yarn - a real yarn. Oh!' First published in 1901, this Australian classic is the candid tale of the aspirations and frustrations of sixteen-year-old Sybylla Melvin, a headstrong country girl constrained by middle-class social arrangements, especially the pressure to marry. Trapped on her parents' outback farm, Sybylla simultaneously loves bush life and hates the physical burdens it imposes. She longs for a more refined lifestyle - to read, to think, to sing - but most of all to do great things. Suddenly her life is transformed when she is whisked away to live on her grandmother's gracious property. There Sybylla falls under the eye of the rich and handsome Harry Beecham. Soon she finds herself choosing between everything a conventional life offers and her own plans for a 'brilliant career'.

In this chilling installment of “the first great series of police thrillers” (Michael Ondaatje, national bestselling author of Warlight) by an internationally renowned crime duo, superintendent Martin Beck investigates a string of child murders. In the once peaceful parks of Stockholm, a killer is stalking young girls and disposing their bodies. The city is on edge, and an undercurrent of fear has gripped its residents. Martin Beck, now a superintendent, has two possible witnesses: a silent, stone-cold mugger and a mute three year old boy. With the likelihood of another murder growing as each day passes, the police force work night and day. But their efforts have offered little insight into the methodology of the killer. Then a distant memory resurfaces in Beck's mind, and he may just have the break he needs.

With the publication of The Third Policeman, Dalkey Archive Press now has all of O'Brien's fiction back in print.

The final novel in the Martin Beck mystery series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö is a masterful, all consuming tale that rushes toward a thrilling, unexpected climax. With a new introduction by Dennis Lehane: "Tension so thick the reader could crack a tooth." An American senator is visiting Stockholm and Martin Beck must lead a team to protect him from an international gang of terrorists. However, in the midst of the fervor created by the diplomatic visit, a young, peace-loving woman is accused of robbing a bank. Beck is determined to prove her innocence, but gets trapped in the maze of police bureaucracy. To complicate matters a millionaire pornographer has been bludgeoned to death in his own bathtub. Filled with the twists and turns and the pulse pounding excitement that are the hallmarks of the Martin Beck novels, The Terrorists is the stunning conclusion to the incredible series that changed crime fiction forever.

With its wonderfully observed lawmen (including the inimitable Martin Beck), its brilliantly rendered felons and their murky Stockholm underworld, and its deftly engineered plot, The Laughing Policeman is a classic of the police procedural and "must reading for anyone who claims to be Ýa student ̈ of the best detective fiction" ("Saturday Review").

Here, in one eBook volume, are the first four books in the hugely acclaimed Martin Beck series – novels that shaped the future of Scandinavian crime fiction and influenced writers from Stieg Larsson to Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankell to Lars Kepplar.

The lightning-paced fifth novel in the Martin Beck mystery series by the internationally renowned crime writing duo, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, finds Beck investigating one of the strangest, most violent, and unforgettable crimes of his career.The incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the building's eleven occupants. And if one of Martin Beck's colleagues hadn't been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe because somehow a regulation fire-truck has vanished. Was it terrorism, suicide, or simply a gas leak? And what if, anything, did the explosion have to do with the peculiar death earlier that day of a 46-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: "Martin Beck"?