I decided to continue with this series even though I had my doubts after the last book. HOWEVER, this book was really good. Lots of reviews on this one so I can't add much to the discussion, but this is the story of a woman who was wronged and everyone else who was affected. I did like the fact that the author drew the reader in with bits and pieces of flashbacks into the "why" of what was happening and that Inspector Van Veeteren had a little bit more help from the other detectives in solving t...

It is right before Christmas and a woman is burying her mother, the only mourner at her grave. She is 29 years old and has lived a miserable life of poverty and addiction. All she has left, once her mother dies, is her own determination, resolve "and the mission". What this mission is, serves as the marrow of this mystery.Shortly after Christmas, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is trying to solve a difficult crime. A man has been murdered by two shots to the chest and two to his groin. By all accou...

i like this series - they are easy/fast to read and offer decent crime plots - i just wish they were more suspenseful.

Maybe I will try another Van Veeteren as several were available from my library and I did borrow others, but based on this one...maybe not.

A great Swedish mystery. Our chief detective is divorced. He’s a chess player and classical music enthusiast. He seems like a great guy without the overwhelming quirks that a lot of literary and TV detectives have these days. Men from a military graduation class thirty years ago are being killed one by one; two shots to the chest; two to the groin. While the mystery unravels, we get a bit of the local color of urban Sweden. This story, one of a series of Inspector Van Veeteren mysteries, also ha...

Very interesting. Read it more for the characters than the mystery - it was fairly clear where this was going pretty early on, but still very well written.

Woman with Birthmark ~Vintage (20) Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery, March 15, 2012 By Ellen Rappaport (Florida) This review is from: Woman with Birthmark (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) (Paperback) I've read all of the books in the Van Veeteren series and find that this Scandinavian author is a master among mystery masters. This particular book is no different-spellbinding and intense. I read this book on my Kindle.The author begins by bringing the reader to a cemetary where an internment is takin

My favorite inspector VV so far. I enjoy that the author uses the entire detective team and not just VV. After a few books you get to know the different characters. Like TV's Barney Miller.

Very dark police procedural. The weather sucks and somebody is killing men when they answer their front doors. Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is curmudgeonly as ever, and if it weren't for his team, this would be an utter bleak-fest. I do really enjoy their long-term struggle for a break or a clue that connects the murdered men.

I enjoy this rather morose thoughtful series. It is interesting to follow along with the investigations & follow the detectives' reasoning. Each world weary character is developed with realism by the author. There are rare glimpses of humor also!

The book opens with a woman standing in a cemetry, a lone mourner at her mother's funeral. A man is then shot twice in his chest and twice below the belt following a series of phone calls where nothing is said but music is played down the line. Shortly after a second man, seeminly unconnected is killed in the same way.Inspector Van Veeteren is struggling with a cold but must find some sort of connection between the two men before someone else dies. This book switches between the viewpoint of the...

Hakan Nesser is another one of my all-time favorite writers of Scandinavian crime fiction. Woman With Birthmark is #4 in this series featuring Inspector Van Veeteren, a veteran detective in Maardam, whose location remains a mystery in itself. These books you can read as stand-alone novels, but there's always a plus to reading a series in order. A solitary mourner at a funeral is at the heart of a baffling series of crimes. A young woman made a death-bed promise to her mother and has cleared the

I agree with several of the positive reviews, this is about the characters and not the crime being played out or solved. Pace is slow and underwhelming just like a real life occurrence.

4.5 starsMy first venture into the novels of Håkan Nesser was by virtue of the exceptional standalone thriller, The Living and the Dead in Winsford, set in a rural village located in Exmoor and I was struck by the mesmerising prose and how well Nesser tempered the pace to maintain knife-edge tension until the closing moments. From then on I wanted to read more of his novels and came upon Woman with Birthmark, the fourth novel in his now concluded and hugely popular, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren

The Shadows’ “The Rise and Fall of Flingel Bunt” (a gem of an instrumental) plays a key role in “Woman With Birthmark.” Like that song, there’s something clean, effortless and neatly scripted about Nesser’s plot, too. The song is played over the telephone by a woman stalking various men—men who later are shot in violent and intentionally up-close-and-personal ways. Also like that song, the feeling of reading this is light and airy. There’s a nice build and a nifty crescendo. Nesser shifts point

A few months ago it was the girl with the dragon tattoo. Now there's a woman with a birthmark. Is this a Swedish sub-genre?I enjoyed this one more than Mind's Eye. There's not much of a mystery here, and the crimes are more observed than solved - so it's not much of a policier either. The pleasure is all in the writing - especially in the mildly morose character of Van Veeteran. I still prefer Håkan Nesser to most American writers. Maybe I'm just an American sucker for that world-weary sophistic...

”It was hard to put her finger on exactly what it was, but she could feel it in her body. Feel it in her skin and in her relaxed muscles; a sort of intoxication that spread among her nerve fibers like gently frothing bubbles, and kept her at a constantly elevated level of consciousness, totally calm and yet with a feeling of being on a high. As high as the sky. An orgasm, she thought in a state of exhilaration, an orgasm going on for an absurdly long period of time. Only very slowly and gently d...

You must be a fan of the police procedural genre of mystery fiction to read Hakan Nesser. I'll go one further and say you have to be a fan of Scandinavian gloom as it effects the characters and the plot. If you read and enjoyed Henning Mankell, then you know exactly what I mean. The atmosphere is somehting altogether different from a book set almost anywhere else on the planet.Also, you are reading in translation. Yes, I know, all translators are traitors, but without them we wouldn't have half

Title: Woman with Birthmark: An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery (Book 4) Author: Håkan Nesser Format: Paperback, 336 pagesGenre: Crime, Mystery, Police ProceduralPublisher: Vintage Crime/Black LizardISBN: 9780307387233Translation Release Date: March 9, 2010Rating: 2 1/2[Read | Skim] [Buy | Borrow]I read the previous Van Veeteren mysteries and I have to say this is my least favorite. Woman with Birthmark is for all intents and purposes a police procedural. It follows the dete...

This is my favorite Inspector Van Veeteren title among the first four in the series -- and I enjoyed the previous three immensely. Van Veeteren and his team are investigating first one seemingly random murder, then a second with the same MO. The team work to determine what, if any connection, the two victims had to each other in order to determine a motive and move them closer to finding the cold-blooded killer. Will there be more victims, and if so, how many and who?From the beginning of the st...