The Strangler's Honeymoon by Håkan Nesser
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is the fourth novel by Håkan Nesser that I am reviewing here. I absolutely loved his Hour of the Wolf and rated it with five stars, an unusually high rating for a novel in the police procedural genre. I found The Inspector and Silence very good (four stars). I also liked Münsters Case, and gave it three stars. Alas, I am unable to recommend The Strangler's Honeymoon, the ninth installment in Nesser's long-running Van Veeteren series.

While the plot that involves the familiar trope of a serial killer is relatively interesting, the book is certainly too long, at 630 pages in the paperback edition. The reader may be tempted—as I was—to just turn the pages, scanning the text instead of reading it, hoping to find the next important fragment. There is so much extraneous stuff in the novel that I am wondering whether the author was under contract to deliver to the publisher a certain number of pages...

Many dialogues sound unnatural and stilted. They often involve repetitions; "What do you mean?" or its equivalents appear too many times in the conversations. I thought that maybe the awkwardness of style was the fault of a new translator, but that was not the case; Laurie Thompson was the translator of all Nesser's novels that I have read.

To sum up: after deleting about 300 pages, it could become a pretty good police procedural.

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