This fifth outing for Håkan Nesser’s Inspector Barbarotti opens with a truly shocking event in the DI’s orbit, and one that has nothing to do with criminality. In the aftermath, he returns to his desk far too soon. Restless and sleep-starved, he is faced with a boss in his final weeks before retirement who is keen to tie up some loose ends. Chief among these are a suspicious disappearance and an even older, inadequately investigated murder, both of which were laid at the door of the wife of one man who was later the partner of the other.
She was dubbed the Axe Woman by the press for her skill in dismembering the corpse. A murderess, it might seem, who deserved her long sentence in Sweden’s sole women’s prison. The parallel narrative however gives us insight into the life of a woman whom fate has dealt blow after blow, her daily round one of joyless drudgery and exploitation by others. Her inner resourcefulness takes its painful time to emerge. But the twists and turns of the plot reveal that nothing about the two cold cases is quite as it appeared.
The novel’s full title in the original Swedish is ‘The Axe Woman of Little Burma’ and readers could be forgiven for expecting the plot to transfer us to sultry eastern climes, but in fact a large chunk of the action plays out at two farms on DI Barbarotti’s home turf of Kymlinge. The two brothers who bought the land used the infamous Burma railway as their inspiration when they named the farms they toiled to build. Previous Barbarotti adventures have taken our investigators to Denmark, Germany and Brittany. This one transports us from home soil in Kymlinge to the magnificent wild expanses of Norrland when Barbarotti is forced to fly north for a long-postponed meeting. The scenery is breathtaking but the haggard DI is in no fit state to enjoy it, and events take a very weird turn.
The slightly elegiac tone to this novel is perhaps explained by the fact that Håkan Nesser said he intended it to be the last part of the Barbarotti series, but one had to be sceptical in view of the number of interesting avenues he left open for exploration. There are hints, for example, that Barbarotti will make good on his long-held intention to head for Italy in search of his absentee father. And what will the more immediate future hold for the DI and his doughty sidekick Eva Backman? And in fact there are now three more Barbarotti books out from Bonniers in Sweden, and eagerly awaiting translation into English.
It is over twenty years now since the late great Laurie Thompson started translating Henning Mankell and Håkan Nesser and clever marketing moves from a few key publishers set the whole Scandi crime wave in motion. Translators of crime fiction in those days were operating in a different publishing climate. The status of this ever-popular genre has been greatly enhanced since then, as have professional development for, and collegiality and support networks within, the translation profession. Some of the country’s leading crime fiction translators have become almost household names, as well they deserve to. And let us also not forget the subtitlers, whose pay and working conditions urgently deserve a boost as they slog away to bring these stories to our TV screens in English, helping to give Nordic Noir a wider audience.
The Axe Woman is published by Mantle (Pan Macmillan).
