THE INSPECTOR AND SILENCE An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery

If you are not already a Nesser fan, this title is not the place to start. Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is called to a scenic lakeside village to help solve an alleged murder at the summer encampment of a cult called The Pure Life. It’s impossible to know if the fault lies with the writer or the translation, but the prose is repetitive, reflexively and tediously ironic, and the plotting seems obvious and thin. Indeed, much of it consists of the various investigators reflecting on what we already know and concluding that it is awful, awful. Simon Vance does his usual attentive, elegant, and skillful job of narrating, but even he can’t do much with such enervated material. B.G. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: JULY 2011]