The dying detective

"A galvanizing new thriller from the internationally acclaimed and best-selling author--a stand-alone novel that finds legendary Swedish homicide detective Lars Martin Johansson racing against time to solve one final murder. In the National Criminal Investigation Department he was known as "the man who sees around corners." Now Johansson is retired, living in the country, his police days behind him. Or so he thinks. When he finds himself in the hospital having suffered a stroke, tests revealing heart problems as well, the only thing that saves him from despair is his doctor's interest in an unsolved murder case from years before. The victim was a nine-year-old girl, raped and strangled to death, and now Johansson determines to solve the crime despite his condition. He launches an informal investigation from his hospital bed--with the help of Matilda, a wannabe Lisbeth Salander, and Max, an orphan personally invested in child-abuse cases--and begins to draw a web of connections between sex tourism, a deceased opera singer, and a self-made millionaire. And as he draws closer to solving the crime, he finds that he is confronting not just a case, but his own mortality."

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.