The better wolf

"Your bite will be deep. Maybe you will prove the better wolf, Mr. Winge, and on that note I bid you good night."

Niklas Natt Och Dag, The Wolf and the Watchman

The crime that gets Cecil Winge off his deathbed is about a ghastly as any you are likely to find in fiction: A body pulled out of a small body of water in Stockholm in 1793 hasn't much left to it. Each of the man's limbs have been cut off, one by one over a period of time. His ears have been cut off, his tongue cut out and his eyes dug out. The watchman who pulls out the body is Mikel Cardell, who himself lost an arm in a sea battle and now helps keep peace in taverns by using his wooden arm as a club.

Winge is dying of tuberculosis, given perhaps just weeks to live, yet the severity of this crime compels him to yield to a request by the temporary chief of police to try to find the killer. He asks Cardell to assist him, and the two of them make a terrific crime-solving duo in the international bestseller The Wolf and the Watchman by Niklas Natt Och Dag (a name that translates as Night and Day).

The novel becomes a series of stories about key characters, their stories eventually melding into one. Nat Och Dag keeps the tension high and the shocks and surprises coming right up until the end. If anything disappoints about this novel it is that given Cecil Winge's frail body it can never turn into a series.