The Laughing Policeman

⚖The case for it

A gunman boards a Stockholm bus in the winter, and the squad grinds through the aftermath with no lone genius anywhere in sight, which readers call a “solid police procedural with a team approach” where “each member of Beck’s team has a particular talent.” Beck coughs and says little, Kollberg carries the warmth, and the scene where Kollberg sits with a grieving partner is what readers name as the most affecting stretch, with nothing happening in it. The cold and the wet do real work. The prose is plain on purpose and produces “a somber, documentary effect,” the authors’ politics sitting under every institution in it.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The treatment of women is “painfully and persistently misogynistic,” enough to sour readers on everything around it. The detectives’ domestic lives crowd the case out through the middle, and the squad reads as flat types rather than the distinct people the series is praised for. Clues arrive when needed rather than through work, so “the investigation felt spoon-fed” while the detectives are “dead in the water more often than they are making real headway.” The resolution then lands fast after all that. One reader files the whole shape as “a rambling, overpopulated, sporadically funny shaggy dog story.”

— the honest librarian

5h

honest hours

7

sittings