Worlds Inside Books

Woman with Birthmark is the fourth novel in the Inspector Van Veeteren series, but you don’t need to have read the other three to understand everything. At least I haven’t read the rest of the series and I don’t think I missed anything important (or anything at all). Maybe if you know what happens in the previous books you have more insight on the characters, but they are described here as if the reader is meeting them for the first time.

The characters are well written. As is it a group of characters, some have better lives than others, but they are all more or less happy. Not much of their home lives is described though, so there may be details in other books that point to the opposite.

What I liked about this novel is that the murderer is a woman and that she is shooting her victims and not poisoning them. This confuses the detectives, because at first they believe the criminal is a man.

The book in general is good, but part of the plot is predictable. Once you consider the possibility that the murderer is a woman, her reasons are a bit obvious. The victims are all men and they’re shot “below the belt”. It is easy to imagine why.