The Department of Sensitive Crimes A Detective Varg novel

Alexander McCall Smith, 1948-

Large print - 2019

"The detectives who work in Malmo Police's Department of Sensitive Crimes take their job very seriously. The lead detective, Ulf Varg, prioritizes his cases above even his dog's mental health. Then there are detectives Anna Bengsdotter, who keeps her relationship with Varg professional even as she realizes she's developing feelings for him . . . or at least for his car, and Carl Holgersson, first to arrive in the morning and last to leave, who would never read his colleagues' personal correspondence--unless it could help solve a crime, of course. Finally, there's Erik Nykvist, who peppers conversations with anecdotes about fly fishing. Along with an opinionated local police officer named Blomquist, the Departme...nt of Sensitive Crimes takes on three extremely strange cases. First, the detectives investigate how and why a local business owner was stabbed . . . in the back of the knee. Next, a young woman's imaginary boyfriend goes missing. And, in the final investigation, Varg must determine whether nocturnal visitations at a local spa have a supernatural element. Using his renowned wit and warmth, Alexander McCall Smith brings a unique perspective on Scandinavian crime. Equal parts hilarious and heartening, The Department of Sensitive Crimes is a tour de farce from a literary master"--

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Subjects
Genres
Mystery fiction
Humorous fiction
Detective and mystery fiction
Published
New York : Random House Large Print [2019]
Language
English
Main Author
Alexander McCall Smith, 1948- (author)
Edition
First large print edition
Physical Description
308 pages (large print) ; 24 cm
ISBN
9781984847386
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

THE much-lamented death of Philip Kerr means that METROPOLIS (Marion Wood/Putnam, $28) is the last we'll see of his cynical antihero, Bernie Gunther, an honest policeman whose life is a daily struggle to preserve a shred of human decency in the decadent world of Berlin between the two world wars. Kerr's 14th novel in this series proves to be Gunther's origin story, which makes it feel imperative as well as poignant. "I've been lucky," says Gunther, who saw action in the trenches of the Great War. "I've come through the worst of it with my soul still intact." That sense of hopeful optimism would be ground down in the years that followed, but now it's only 1928 and he still believes he can stand up for the miserable and the mistreated, for people like the prostitutes being murdered while they ply their trade, then ceremoniously scalped. Kerr's studies of the wounded veterans populating the streets of Berlin are as arresting as his portrait of Hans Gross, the police photographer known as "Cecil B. DeMorgue." "Metropolis," the Otto Dix triptych that illustrates the text, must have been under Kerr's nose when he wrote the novel's vivid night-life scenes, as observed in underground clubs like the Topkeller, a lesbian cabaret known for staging Black Masses, and the Cabaret of the Nameless, "a place all respectable people should avoid," according to Gunther's scandalized landlady. Avoided by all but the artists, that is. As George Grosz tells Gunther, "My themes as an artist are despair, disillusionment, hate, fear, corruption, hypocrisy and death." Of all the sights of this jaded city none are more appalling than the stark images of amputee veterans rolling along on wooden "cripple-carts." "Ten years after the armistice, Berlin's disabled veterans were still so ubiquitous that nobody - myself included - gave them a second thought," Gunther confesses. "They were like stray cats or dogs - always around." No wonder he chooses to disguise himself as one of them in order to catch the killer. No one will notice him, more's the shame and the pity. Tucking into A brand-new mystery series by Alexander McCall Smith is a lazy-dazy pleasure, something like going fishing. And, as the author reminds us in THE DEPARTMENT OF SENSITIVE CRIMES (Pantheon, $24.95), "If you can't find the time to go fishing, then ... well, what's the point?" McCall Smith's Swedish detective, Ulf (the Wolf) Varg, heads up a special unit of the Malmö Criminal Investigation Authority charged with probing crimes of a peculiar nature. There's the curious case of the owner of a market stall who was stabbed in the back of the knee. And a head-scratcher about a lonely student suspected of murdering her imaginary boyfriend. Not to mention the mysterious matter of the werewolf terrorizing clients at a spa. There are no connections among these bizarre crimes, which are resolved individually, with humor and a dash of tristesse. What binds the stories are the tight relationships of Varg and his colleagues and their hilariously human crotchets. They share their thoughts on everything from dealing with dry skin to political correctness (someone worried about using the word "midget" for a dance instructor is advised that "it's safer to call him a very small person"). As for Varg, he's such a sweetheart that he teaches his deaf dog to lipread. Talk about timely! Peter May's unnerving nail-biter, THE MAN WITH NO FACE (Quercus, $26.99), IS set in Brussels, where a diplomatic debate is politely raging over Britain's possible membership in the European Union. Although the politics are dirty and the politicians dirtier, May's prescient plot actually dates back to 1979, two years before this novel was first published in England. For his sins against the dignity of his stuffy Scottish newspaper, a headstrong journalist named Neil Bannerman has been sent to cover the boring negotiations. Lucky for him, a professional assassin known as Kale is also on his way to Brussels, on assignment to eliminate a high-ranking British diplomat. With his unforgettable mug ("What was it about this face whose still, dark eyes stared out from the back seat?" a spooked cabdriver asks himself), Kale seems a strange choice for a hit man. But he knows his bloody business. NAISIE dobbs is adept at repairing an automobile engine and driving an ambulance. That's her dangerous job in the american AGENT (Harper/HarperCollins, $27.99), Jacqueline Winspear's latest mystery featuring this trained nurse and full-time sleuth. It's 1940 and Britain is bearing up under the Blitz when a government agent asks Maisie to investigate the murder of an American war correspondent. "We can't lay this one at Hitler's feet," her contact says, pointing out that the killing took place at the reporter's London lodgings. Well, yes, we can, because everything in this series turns on the psychological traumas of war. That's what gives Maisie's sometimes prosaic cases their sturdy backbone and air of urgency - that and Maisie's own dynamic character. Hang onto your helmet and carry on, girl! MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

McCall Smith, famed for his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, set in Botswana, now extends his gift for comic situations and insightful commentary to a projected series set in Sweden Scandi-Lite, his publisher has dubbed it, in contrast to the bleakness of Scandinavian noir, but the hook sells McCall Smith short. While there's a great deal of humor here, this isn't as ""lite,"" say, as cozy series set in a knitting shop. It's true that the Department of Sensitive Crimes is a catchall agency for crimes that the police in Sweden's Criminal Investigation Authority consider either too minor, too weird, or too annoying to deal with. But, as in the No. 1 Ladies' series, McCall Smith uses these cases to shine a revealing light on human nature, including the foibles and heartaches of the investigators. The department is headed by Ulf Varg (both names mean wolf in Swedish), who is a bit of a lone wolf himself. Ulf and his investigators in Malmö, the third largest city in Sweden, investigate three sensitive cases over the course of the novel: the stabbing in the knee of a market vendor; the disappearance and suspected murder of an imaginary boyfriend; and various sightings (and hearings) of a werewolf at a Scandinavian spa. The second case is especially fascinating, showing how a lie can expand. Detective Varg promises to be a complex series character, and the department itself looks certain to deliver more oddball yet poignant cases.--Connie Fletcher Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Ulf Varg, the lead detective in this appealing series launch from Smith (the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series), works for the Sensitive Crimes Department of the MalmA¶, Sweden, Criminal Investigation Authority. He and his colleagues, including married Anna Bengsdotter, on whom the divorced Ulf has a guilty crush, investigate minor crimes, such as the nonfatal stabbing of a market vendor in the back of the knee. Ulf easily figures out whodunit, the focus being on why the culprit, basically a decent man, did the deed and his subsequent treatment within the justice system. Another case involves a lonely young woman, Bim SundstrA¶m, who invents an imaginary boyfriend, Sixten, to impress others. Complications ensue when Bim claims that Sixten, a medical student, has suddenly left her and gone off to a research station at the North Pole. A third case concerns a purported werewolf, whose nocturnal howls are driving away customers from a resort spa. As usual, the interpersonal relationships Smith so sensitively portrays and the ethical issues he raises matter far more than the sleuthing. Fans of gentle mysteries will look forward to the sequel. Agent: Robin Straus, Robin Straus Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The chronicler of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency (The Colors of All the Cattle, 2018, etc.) and 44 Scotland Street (A Time of Love and Tartan, 2018, etc.) takes on Nordic noir. Guess who comes out on top.The staff of Malm's Sensitive Crimes Department are pretty sensitive themselves. Ulf Varg worries what sorts of life choices will be left to him once he turns 40. Anna Bengsdotter, married to an anaesthetist, is secretly in love with Ulf, and he with her. Carl Holgersson shoulders most of the squad's actual work out of a cheerful sense of duty. Clerical assistant Erik Nykvist fishes whenever he can and dreams of his retirement, when he expects to fish even more. The group is evidently assigned to investigate crimes too marginal and quirky for anyone else in law enforcement. Why would someone stab market trader Malte Gustafsson painfully but ineffectually behind his knee? Has university student Bim Sundstrm's boyfriend gone to the North Pole, as she claims, or has she actually done away with him? (Not-really-a-spoiler alert: She's made him up in response to her chums' nonstop questions about her love life.) And why has someone launched a social media attack that seems intended to put the spa run by Police Commissioner Felix Ahlstrm's cousin out of business? Tearing himself from the side of Marten, the beloved poodle mix he's taught to cope with his deafness by lip-reading, Ulf and his cohort reluctantly partner with uniformed officer Blomquist to bring the parties involved to justice.Fans of the bestselling author's long-running franchises won't be surprised by the two most distinctive features of the gravely waggish department's caseload: The mysteries seem both utterly inconsequential and quietly provocative, and they have long tails that continue to flop around even after they're nominally solved. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter One Free Association, Charged at Normal Rates "Søren," said Dr. Svensson, gravely, but with a smile behind his horn-rimmed glasses; and then waited for the response. There would be an answer to this one- word sentence, but he would have to wait to see what it was.   Ulf Varg, born in Malmö, Sweden, the son of Ture and Liv Varg, only too briefly married, now single again; thirty-eight, and there­fore fast approaching what he thought of as a watershed--"After forty, Ulf," said his friend Lars, "where does one go?"--that same Ulf Varg raised his eyes to the ceiling when his therapist said, "Søren." And then Ulf himself, almost without thinking, replied: "Søren?"   The therapist, kind Dr. Svensson, as so many of his patients described him, shook his head. He knew that a therapist should not shake his head, and he had tried to stop himself from doing it too often, but it happened automatically, in the same way as we make so many gestures without really thinking about them--twitches, sniffs, movements of the eyebrow, the folding and unfold­ing of legs. Although many of these acts are meaningless, mere concomitants of being alive, shaking one's head implies disapprobation. And kind Dr. Svensson did not disapprove. He understood, which is quite different from disapproving.   But now he disapproved, and he shook his head before he reminded himself not to disapprove, and not to shake his head. "Are you asking me or telling me?" he said. "Because you shouldn't be asking, you know. The whole point of free association, Mr. Varg, is to bring to the surface--to outward expression--the things that are below the surface."   To bring to the surface the things that are below the surface . . . Ulf liked that. That, he thought, is what I do every time I go into the office. I get out of bed in the morning to bring to the surface the things that are below the surface. If I had a mission statement, then I suppose that is more or less what it would be. It would be far better than the one foisted on his department by Headquarters: We serve the public. How bland, how anodyne that was--like all the communications they received from Headquarters. Those grey men and women with their talk of targets and sensitivity and more or less everything except the one thing that mattered: finding those who broke the law.   "Mr. Varg?"   Ulf let his gaze fall from the ceiling. Now he was staring at the carpet, and at Dr. Svensson's brown suede shoes. They were brogues, with that curious holed pattern that somebody had once explained to him was all to do with letting the shoes breathe, and was not just a matter of English aesthetics. They were expensive, he imagined. When he first saw them, he had decided that they were English shoes, because they had that look about them, and that was precisely the sort of thing that a good detective noticed. Italian shoes were thinner, and more elegant, presumably because the Italians had thinner, more elegant feet than the English. The Dutch, of course, had even bigger feet than the English; Dutchmen, Ulf reflected, were tall, big- boned people. They were large--which was odd, in a way, because Holland was such a small country . . . and so prone to flooding, as that story he had been read as a child made so clear--the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke . . .   "Mr. Varg?" There was a slight note of impatience in Dr. Svens­son's tone. It was all very well for patients to go off into some rev­erie of their own, but the whole point of these sessions was to disclose, not conceal, and they should articulate what they were thinking, rather than just think it.   "I'm sorry, Dr. Svensson. I was thinking."   "Ah!" said the therapist. "That's precisely what you're meant to do, you know. Thinking precedes verbalisation, and verbalisation precedes resolution. And much as I approve of that, what we're trying to do here is to find out what you think without thinking. In other words, we want to find out what's going on in your mind. Because that's what--"   Ulf nodded. "Yes, I know. I understand. I just said Søren because I wasn't quite sure what you meant. I wanted to be sure."   "I meant Søren. The name. Søren."   Ulf thought. Søren triggered nothing. Had Dr. Svensson said Harald, or Per, he would have been able to respond bully or teeth because that was what he thought of. They had been boys in his class, so had Dr. Svensson said Harald, he might have replied bully, because that was what Harald was. And if he had said Per, he would have replied teeth, because Per had a gap in his front teeth that his parents were too poor to have attended to by an orthodontist.   Then it came to him, quite suddenly, and he replied, "Kierkegaard."   This seemed to please Dr. Svensson. "Kierkegaard?" the therapist repeated.   "Yes, Søren Kierkegaard."   Dr. Svensson smiled. It was almost time to bring the session to a close, and he liked to end on a thoughtful note. "Would you mind my asking, why Kierkegaard? Have you read him?"   Ulf replied that he had.   "I'm impressed," said Dr. Svensson. "One doesn't imagine that a . . ." He stopped.   Ulf looked at him expectantly.   Dr. Svensson tried to cover his embarrassment, but failed. "I didn't mean, well, I didn't mean it to sound like that."   "Your unconscious?" said Ulf mildly. "Your unconscious mind speaking."   The therapist smiled. "What I was going to say--but stopped myself just in time--was that I didn't expect a policeman to have read Kierkegaard. I know that there's no earthly reason why a policeman should not read Kierkegaard, but it is unusual, would you not agree?"   "I'm actually a detective."   Dr. Svensson was again embarrassed. "Of course you are."   "Although detectives are policemen in essence."   Dr. Svensson nodded. "As are judges and public health offi­cials and politicians too, I suppose. Anybody who tells us how to behave is a policeman in a sense."   "But not therapists?"   Dr. Svensson laughed. "A therapist shouldn't tell you how to behave. A therapist should help you to see why you do what you do, and should help you to stop doing it--if that's what you want. So, no, a therapist is certainly not a policeman." He paused. "But why Kierkegaard? What appeals to you about Kierkegaard?"   "I didn't say he appealed. I said I had read him. That's not the same thing as saying he appealed."   Dr. Svensson glanced at his watch again. "I think perhaps we should leave it at that," he said. "We've covered a fair amount of ground today."   Ulf rose to his feet.   "Now what?" asked Dr. Svensson.   "Now what, what?"   "I was wondering what you were going to do next. You see, my patients come into this room, they talk--or, rather, we talk--and then they go out into the world and continue with their lives. And I remain here and think--not always, but sometimes--I think: What are they going outside to do? Do they go back to their houses and sit in a chair? Do they go into some office somewhere and move pieces of paper from one side of the desk to another? Or stare at a screen again until it's time to go home to a house where the children are all staring at screens? Is that what they do? Is that why they bother ?"   Ulf hesitated. "Those are very profound questions. Very. But since you ask, I can tell you that I'm going back to my office. I shall sit at my desk and write a report on a case that we have just closed."   "You close cases," muttered Dr. Svensson. "Mine remain open. They are unresolved, for the most part."   "Yes, we close cases. We're under great pressure to close cases."   Dr. Svensson sighed. "How fortunate." He moved to the window. I look out of the window, he thought. The patients go off to do significant things, such as closing cases, and I look out of my window. Then he said, "I don't suppose you could tell me what this case involved."   "I can't give you names, or other details," replied Ulf. "But I can tell you it involved the infliction of a very unusual injury."   Dr. Svensson turned round to face his patient.   "To the back of somebody's knee," said Ulf.   "How strange. To the back of the knee?"   "Yes," said Ulf. "But I can't really say much more than that."   "Odd."   Ulf frowned. "That I should not explain further? Is that odd?"   "No, that somebody should injure another person in the back of the knee. Of course, the choice of a target is hardly random. We injure what we love, what we desire, every bit as much as that which we hate. But it is odd, isn't it? The back of a knee . . . "   Ulf began to walk towards the door. "You'd be very sur­prised, Dr. Svensson, at how odd people can be. Yes, even in your profession--where you hear all sorts of dark secrets from your patients, day in, day out. Even then. You'd be surprised."   "Would I?"   "Yes," said Ulf. "If you stood in my shoes for a few days, your jaw would hit the table in astonishment. Regularly."   Dr. Svensson smiled. "Well, well." His smile faded. The jaw. Freud, he remembered, died of a disease that affected his jaw. Alone in London, with enemies circling, that illuminating intel­ligence, liberating in its perspicacity, flickered and died, leaving us to face the darkness and the creatures that inhabited it. Excerpted from The Department of Sensitive Crimes: A Detective Varg Novel by Alexander McCall Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.