Hakan Nesser is back with the second instalment in the Inspector Barbarotti series, The Root of Evil.

July 2007. A letter arrives on Inspector Barbarotti’s doorstep detailing a murder that is about to take place in his quiet Swedish town. By the time the police track down the subject of the letter, he is already dead.

So when a second letter arrives, then a third, and a fourth, it’s a game of cat and mouse to stop the killer before he can make good on all of his promises.

Meanwhile, an anonymous diary is unearthed depicting the incidents of a two-week holiday in France five years earlier, and it doesn’t take Barbarotti long to realize the people populating the diary are the ones whose lives are now in the balance....