Last year, Leif GW Persson's astonishing novel, Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End was published in English. It is, unquestionably, one of the murkiest and most tangled tales ever written. At its heart, it involves a mystery, and one that officially remains a mystery to this day; the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme on a Stockholm street in February 1986, but Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the kind of mystery that readers have come to expect.

When I recommended it to people, and I did quite often, I did so with the warning that reading it would take some persistence. The book involves two separate simultaneous investigations of a death, both of which are compromised in different ways. It is a long book, an unabashedly political book, and a hard-edged examination of several Swedish institutions, (including the government,) and, since the two investigations rarely overlap, it takes some time for the reader to bring them into focus.

And it is not to be taken lightly. Persson, once a member of the police and still a high-ranking consultant on matters of security, has first-hand knowledge of the intricacies of the groups involved. All democratic nations need some safeguards and oversight on their law enforcement agencies, as this brilliant novel makes abundantly clear.

Now, the second book in the trilogy has been published in English, and offers an unusual opportunity.

The new book, Another Time, Another Life, is another expertly crafted crime novel. The trenchant political dimension remains a major factor, as does the incompetence and self-serving infighting that characterized the investigations in the first book, but Another Time, Another Life is the exquisitely realized story of a police investigation of a murder. Sometimes, with so much else going on in these novels, one can forget that they are stories of the struggles of honest and upright police officers to solve crimes and bring miscreants to justice, often despite interference from their superiors.

This book starts in 1975, with the occupation of the West German Embassy in Stockholm by six young people demanding the release from German custody of members of the Baader-Meinhof group. The occupation ends badly.

One of the Swedish police officers present at that time, Bo Jarnebring, in 1989 investigates the murder of a civil servant. The murder has many questions about it, but the official solution ignores most of them and Jarnebring has to let pass his reservations about the case.

Ten years even further along, Jarnebring's friend and former colleague, Lars Martin Johansson, takes a job as head of the Swedish Security Police, and inherits two files, which lead to a re-examination of the previous cases.
It occurs to me that one could quite easily read these books in the reverse order from their appearance. Another Time, Another Life has a much more conventional linearity and would ease the immersion into this complex and twisted security culture. Regardless of the order in which they are consumed, Leif GW Persson's trilogy has raised the police procedural to a new level. These books are not to be missed.