Product Description Inspector Beck is packed off to Budapest, where a journalist has vanished without a trace. As he trolls about in the Eastern Europe underworld, he pursues a case whose international boundaries grow with every new clue. Review The Martin Beck mysteries dont just read well; they reread even better. Ingenious. --New York Times Book ReviewMartin Beck is a man driven to solve puzzles, with a small tragic intuition swimming deep in his mental waters that will surface suddenly to give a muted howl and then dive down again. --New York TimesEnormously satisfying. Washington Post Book World They changed the genre. Whoever is writing crime fiction after these novels is inspired by them in one way or another. Henning Mankell If you haven t read Sjowall/Wahloo, start now. Sunday Telegraph --. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The room was small and shabby. There were no curtains and the view outside consisted of a gray fire wall, a few rusty armatures and a faded advertisement for margarine. The centre pane of glass in the left half of the window was gone and had been replaced by a roughly cut piece of cardboard. The wallpaper was floral, but so discolored by soot and seeing moisture that the pattern was scarcely visible. Here and there it had come away from the crumbling plaster, and in several places there had been attempts to repair it with adhesive strips and wrapping paper.There were a heating stove, six pieces of furniture and a picture in the room. In front of the stove stood a cardboard box of sashes and a dented aluminum coffee pot. The end of the bed faced the stove and the bedclothes consisted of a thick layer of old newspapers, a ragged quilt and a striped pillow. The picture was of a naked blonde standing beside a marble balustrade, and it was hanging to the right of the stove so that the person laying in the bed could see it before he fell asleep and immediately when he work up. Someone appeared to have enlarged the woman's nipples and genitals with a pencil.In the other part of the room, nearest to the window, stood a round table and two wooden chairs, of which one had lost its back. On the table were three empty vermouth bottles, a soft-drink bottle and two coffee cups, among other things. The ash tray has been turned upside down and among the cigarette butts, bottle tops and dead matches lay a few dirty sugar lumps, a small penknife with its blades open, and a piece of sausage. A third coffee cup had fallen to the floor and had broken. Face down on the worn linoleum, between the table and the bed, lay a dead body.In all probability this was the same person who had improved upon the picture and tired to med the wallpaper with strips of adhesive and wrapping paper. It was a man and he was lying with his legs close together, his elbows pressed against his ribs and his hands drawn up toward his head, as if in an effort to protect himself. The man was wearing a woolen vest and frayed trousers. On his feet were ragged woolen socks. A large sideboard had been tipped over him, obscuring his head and half the top part of his body. The third woolen socks. A large sideboard had been tipped over him, obscuring his head and half the tope part of his body. The third wooden chair had been thrown down beside the corpse. Its seat was bloodstained and on the top of the back handprints were clearly visible. The floor was covered with pieces of glass. Some of them had come from the glass doors of the sideboard, others from had come from the glass doors of the sideboard, others form a half-shattered wine bottle which had been thrown onto a heap of dirty underclothes by the wall. What was felt of the bottle was covered with a think skin of dried blood. Someone had drawn a white circle around it.Of its kind, the picture was almost perfect, taken by the best wide-angle lens the police possessed and in an artificial light that gave an etched sharpness to every detail.Mart