Americans would be shocked to understand just how their religious beliefs have been used against them in the political elites' efforts to engineer society and public policy. In this historical overview of key moments in American religious history, Gadsby demonstrates that what we are commonly-taught in our education systems, mass-media and the political world about religions' role in any number of events, is anything but. In the spirit of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Religious Delusions, Ameri...

On a cold and rainy Stockholm night, nine bus riders are gunned down by an unknown assassin. The press, anxious for an explanation for the seemingly random crime, quickly dubs the killer a madman. But Superintendent Martin Beck of the Stockholm Homicide Squad suspects otherwise: this apparently motiveless killer has managed to target one of Beck’s best detectives, young Åke Stenström. Reasoning that Stenström would not have been riding that lethal bus without a reason, Beck retraces his st...

Someone is killing young girls in the once peaceful parks of Stockholm—killing them after “having his way” with them. The people of Stockholm are tense and fearful. Police Superintendent Martin Beck has two witnesses: a cold-blooded mugger who won’t say much and a three-year-old boy who can’t say much. The dedicated work of the police force seems to be leading nowhere, and with each passing day, the likelihood of another murder grows. But then Beck remembers someone—or something—he overhea...

His holiday with his family has just begun, but a phone call sends Martin Beck packing off to Budapest, where a boorish journalist has vanished without a trace. With the aid of the coolly efficient local police, who do business while soaking at the public baths, Beck must troll about in the Eastern Europe underworld for a man nobody knows—while he is at the risk of vanishing along with his quarry.The Man Who Went Up in Smoke gives us the dedicated Beck at his most engaging...

Gunvald Larsson sits carefully observing the dingy Stockholm apartment of a man under police surveillance. He looks at his watch: nine minutes past eleven in the evening. At that same moment, the house explodes, killing at least three people. Chief Inspector Martin Beck and his men don’t suspect arson or murder until they discover a peculiar circumstance linking the explosion to a suicide committed that same day. The dead man left a note consisting of just two words: Martin Beck.Th...

Martin Beck faces one of the greatest challenges of his professional life when his investigation unearths evidence of police corruption and brutality in this incredible seventh novel in the Martin Beck mystery series.The bloody murder of a police captain in his hospital room exposes the particularly unsavory history of a man who spent forty years practicing a horribly brutal brand of strong-arm police work. Nonetheless, Martin Beck and his colleagues scour Stockholm for the murdere...

In the penultimate installment of this masterful crime-fiction series, Martin Beck, now head of the National Murder Squad, is called in to a sleepy part of the countryside to investigate a woman’s disappearance. What Beck doesn’t know is that the woman has already been murdered, her body dumped in a swamp. At the same time, a midnight shoot-out between three cops and two teenage boys ends with one policeman dead.As Beck and his partner, Lennart Kollberg, investigate both cases, the...

The eighth classic installment in this genre-changing Martin Beck series of novels starring Detective Inspector Martin Beck is a masterful take on a classic locked-room mystery.A young blonde in sunglasses robs a bank and kills a hapless citizen. Across town, a corpse with a bullet shot through its heart is found in a locked room—with no gun at the scene. The crimes seem disparate, but to Martin Beck they are two pieces of the same puzzle, and solving it becomes the one way he can ...

The Terrorists is the last Martin Beck mystery, finished just a few weeks before Per Wahlöö’s death. The book is, in effect, a marvelous summing up of the series. The story centers on the visit of an American senator to Stockholm. Martin Beck tries to protect him from an international gang of terrorists, while they decide that Beck too should be removed from the scene. Interwoven with this basic story are two fascinating subplots. One, a classic mini-mystery, is the story of a mil...

When Viktor Palmgren, a powerful industrialist, is shot during an after-dinner speech, the repercussions—both on the international money markets and on the residents of the small coastal town of Malmö—are widespread. Chief Inspector Martin Beck is called in to help catch a killer nobody, not even the victim, was able to identify. He begins a systemic search for the friends, enemies, business associates and call girls who may have wanted Palmgren dead. But in the process, he finds to his di...

While on a field trip through the woods on the outskirts of Behren, a young girl stumbles upon a decomposing body wrapped in a carpet and lying in a ditch. The body has no hands, feet, or head, but this was not the work of wild animals. A brutal killer is on the loose—but who is the victim?From the hospital bed where he is recovering from surgery, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren begins to piece together the fragmentary clues that involve a nun who hides a secret, a crippled woman, the...

An ex-con is brutally murdered with an ax in Kaalbringen. Then the body of a wealthy real estate mogul is found, also the victim of a violent attack. There appears to be a serial killer on the loose, and Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is called in to help the local police. As details surrounding the grisly murders are collected, Van Veeteren finds little to go on. But then there’s another murder, and shortly thereafter one of Van Veeteren’s colleagues, a promising female detective, goes miss...