Joan Tate Livres

With a New Introduction by Colin Dexter The cunning 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 since-for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain-a regulation firetruck 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 forty-six-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: “Martin Beck”?

Anna has returned from visiting her mother. Restless and unable to sleep, she wanders through her parents' house, revisiting the scenes of her childhood. In a cupboard drawer, folded and pushed away from sight, she finds a sepia photograph of her grandmother, Hanna, whom she remembers as old and forbidding, a silent stranger enveloped in a huge pleated black dress. Now, looking at the features Anna recognises as her own, she realises she is looking at a different woman from the one of her memory. Set against the majestic isolation of the Scandinavian lakes and mountains, this is more than a story of three Swedish women. It is a moving testament of a time forgotten and an epic romance in every sense of the word.

The man who founded Ikea at the age of seventeen in 1943 reveals how he built his business into the largest and most well-known furniture manufacturer in the world.

Under the Snow opens with a phone call from an outlying village to police constable Torsson, and the news is of a mah jong party turned sour. A brawl broke out and a man named Matti was accidentally killed. When he questions the villagers, Torsson notices some minor discrepancies in their stories, but writes them off as unimportant. It is not until a few months later that he is forced to reopen the case: David, an eccentric artist and old friend of Matti, has arrived in town for a visit with no knowledge of the death. David has an uneasy feeling about the whole affair, and when he finds Anna Ryd, the town's beautiful English teacher, running away with a bag containing a noose with human hairs on it, he makes it his business to find out what happened. Gradually the facts of the case come to light and dark deeds which were covered up in the snow and darkness of winter are finally brought to light under the relentless summer sun.