Vintage announces the re-launch of the Martin Beck Police Mystery series, with new jackets and fresh introductions from some of the biggest names in Crime Fiction today. All ten books from Edgar Award-winners Sjwall and Wahl will be forthcoming in paperback in the next few seasons. Enormously satisfying.... Terse, tense, and eminently readable.--"Chicago Tribune"

The masterful second novel in the Martin Beck series of mysteries by the internationally renowned crime writing duo, Maj Sj wall and Per Wahl , finds Beck searching Budapest for a well-known Swedish journalist who has disappeared without a trace. With an introduction by Val McDermid: "So many of the elements that have become integral...in the police procedural subgenre started life in these ten novels....Their plots are second to none."

Inspector Martin Beck of the Stockholm Homicide Squad has his summer vacation abruptly terminated when the top brass at the foreign office pack him off to Budapest to search for Alf Matsson, a well-known Swedish journalist who has vanished. Beck investigates viperous Eastern European underworld figures and--at the risk of his life--stumbles upon the international racket in which Matsson was involved. With the coolly efficient local police on his side and a predatory nymphet on his tail, Beck pursues a case whose international implications grow with each new clue.