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A review by sarahsadiesmith
Cop Killer by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö
4.0
The penultimate novel and it’s called Cop Killer. I approached this with a little trepidation as I’m besties with most the characters at this point and I deal with their loss much poorer than I do with actual humans, I may be defective. Or a sociopath. I need not have worried though. The cop killing happens about two thirds in, and it’s more a device in which the authors use to make a valid (and forever topical) point but I’ll get to that in a minute. What keeps us occupied until then is murder of a woman, who is left in a swamp in a rural part of Sweden. Beck and Kollberg, the original duo are left to investigate and the novels come full circle with the reappearance of the murderer from the first story, Roseanna. It sort of becomes a little roll call of quite a few characters cropping up from the prior stories in the series but never overbearingly so.
It’s interesting to see how rural Sweden differs to Stockholm where the majority of the series is set, and also the contrast in Beck and Kollberg from the first novel to this one, Kollberg in particular conveys a sense of disillusionment with regard to how the police force has changed (it was nationalised and the fallout of that become increasingly apparent as we progress through the series) and it is in this novel we get the straw that broke the camels back for him.
As ever Sjöwall and Wahlöö might be writing crime novels but it’s never so much about the crime as the cause, the far reaching consequences of a poorly ran society, and how that affects the population on an individual level. In Cop Killer we are offered a solid argument regarding gun control and why the police force should not be militarised, this crops up in several of their novels and is a point well made. You cant help but think of current day America when reading these books, these two Swedes had figured out 50 or so years ago what an awful lot of people still can’t see. I kind of think Darwin maybe got it wrong, survival of the fittest isn’t quite how it always goes with humans. Oh well.
It’s interesting to see how rural Sweden differs to Stockholm where the majority of the series is set, and also the contrast in Beck and Kollberg from the first novel to this one, Kollberg in particular conveys a sense of disillusionment with regard to how the police force has changed (it was nationalised and the fallout of that become increasingly apparent as we progress through the series) and it is in this novel we get the straw that broke the camels back for him.
As ever Sjöwall and Wahlöö might be writing crime novels but it’s never so much about the crime as the cause, the far reaching consequences of a poorly ran society, and how that affects the population on an individual level. In Cop Killer we are offered a solid argument regarding gun control and why the police force should not be militarised, this crops up in several of their novels and is a point well made. You cant help but think of current day America when reading these books, these two Swedes had figured out 50 or so years ago what an awful lot of people still can’t see. I kind of think Darwin maybe got it wrong, survival of the fittest isn’t quite how it always goes with humans. Oh well.