Ulf Varg, a Swedish detective, whose name translated means Wolf Wolf—Ulf being Danish for wolf, and Varg being Swedish for the same thing—was not a man for romance. He had been married before, but this marriage had come to an amicable end when his wife decided that she wanted to live in Australia—alone. Rather to his surprise, he discovered that being single suited him, although admittedly there were moments when he felt lonely. Loneliness in Scandinavia can somehow seem—to those, elsewhere, who read about it—more intense than in other parts of the world. Perhaps it is the emptiness of the landscape; perhaps it is something to do with cultural expectations. Whatever it is, being a lonely Swedish detective can be fairly bleak; even if Scandinavian noir fiction is all the rage and has numerous followers abroad, these detectives can still be lonely at home, looking out over a frozen landscape or contemplating the silence of a long drawn-out northern night.

Ulf had a social life, of course. From time to time he saw his brother, Bjorn, and he had a cousin in Stockholm with whom he occasionally went on aimless, badly-planned fishing trips. They rarely caught any fish, of course, a fact that his cousin jokingly put down to his “bad fishing karma”.

Ulf, however, thought that there might be some truth in that explanation.

Bjorn Varg was the leader of a minor political party, the Moderate Extremists. This party had once been a member of an unstable political coalition that enjoyed power for seventeen days before collapsing under a vote of no-confidence. Bjorn referred to that period proudly as ‘my days in government’. He thought that he could have changed things for the better if he had been given a few more days to do the job; as it was, his coalition achieved nothing at all—not one piece of legislation, although it did make four minor regulations that were subsequently repealed by the incoming government.