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specializes in Modern First Editions,Out-of-Print, and Hard-to Find books in a variety of categories.
If you are looking for something interesting to read, take a look at the zenosbooks blog or see reviews from zenosbooks on librarything.com
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Zeno’s (established 1983) is an online used and out-of-print bookstore specializing in the categories of: literature in translation, modern first editions, and hard-to-find books. We started as a mail order business. In 1992 we moved into a storefront, and then to a bigger location a couple of years later. Eventually we closed the physical store to go online as zenosbooks.com. We have been selling our own hand-picked eclectic selection of used, hard-to-find, and even rare books via the internet ever since. We also offer a selection of over 60,000 new book titles. If you want to order a book that you don’t see on our site, let us know what it is. If it is in print we can probably get it for you. Write a review on our site (zenosbooks.com/shopping) of your favorite book and receive a 10% discount coupon. If you don't find your favorite book on our site, let us know about it and maybe we can add it.
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What I am reading...
I am nearly finished rereading the Martin Beck mysteries of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. If you have not had the pleasure, you might want to give them a try. Here's a taste -
A naked woman was dredged up from the bottom of Sweden's beautiful Lake Vattern one July day. Where had she come from? How had she got there? And why? . . . a rash of brutal muggings and child sex-murders with the elusive mugger perhaps the only person in Stockholm to have seen the murderer . . . the search for a hard-drinking well-known Swedish journalist in Budapest, who has vanished without a trace . . . eight people were shot to death in a Stockholm bus, with one of the dead being an ambitious young detective whose private life was both perverse and mysterious . . . an incendiary device blows the roof off a Stockholm apartment house one cold winter night interrupting the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, and for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain - the fire department didn't arrive until too late. How could a regulation-sized ladder truck vanish in the center of Stockholm? . . . the peculiar death of a 46-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: 'Martin Beck'? . . . the murder of a powerful Swedish industrialist during his after-dinner speech in the elegant Hotel Savoy with a shot in the head . . . the bloody murder of a police captain in his hospital room by a demented and deadly rifleman exposing the particularly unsavory history of a man who spent forty years practicing brutality and force . . . a decayed corpse with a bullet through its head is found inside a locked room. Suicide? Perhaps - but inside the locked room there is no gun. A young blonde in sunglasses holds up a bank and shoots the hapless citizen who moves to stop her . . . a blond woman in her middle thirties in a small Swedish town is brutally murdered and left buried in a swamp. Some weeks later her decomposing body is found accidentally by a group of hikers. Prime suspects are the convicted sex murderer who was her only neighbor on a lonely country road, and her former husband - a rough, drunken retired sailor. Meanwhile, on a quiet suburban street in another part of Sweden, a midnight shootout take place between three cops and two teenage boys. Dead: one cop and two teenage boys. Wounded: two cops. Escaped: one kid . . . an American senator visits Stockholm and Martin Beck tries to protect him from an international gang of terrorists, while they decide that Beck too should be removed from the scene . . . a millionaire pornographer bludgeoned to death in his own bathtub . . . a young girl, a Swedish hippie, caught up unexpectedly in the maze of police bureaucracy . . . and of course, a homicide detective who is a chain smoker with a graveyard cough and an abused stomach; a 'weekend' sailor who likes to spend what time he has making model ships, living in a gray suburban apartment with his once pretty wife and two children with whom he has few points of contact and little in common.
At the moment I am in the middle of THE TERRORISTS.
The Terrorists. New York. November 1976. Pantheon Books. 1st American Edition. 281 pages. 0394485327. Cover: illustration by James Barkely. Translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate.
THE TERRORISTS is the last Martin Beck mystery, tragically finished just a few weeks before Per Wahloo’s death. The book is, in effect, a marvelous summing up. The story centers on the visit of an American senator to Stockholm. Martin Beck tries to protect him from an international gang of terrorists, while they decide that Beck too should be removed from the scene. Interwoven with this basic story are two fascinating subplots. One, a classic mini-mystery, is the story of a millionaire pornographer bludgeoned to death in his own bathtub. The other is the story of a young girl, a Swedish hippie, caught up unexpectedly in the maze of police bureaucracy. As in other Martin Beck books, the plot comes together in a totally unexpected climax. Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo met as journalists working on different magazines. Over lunch one day they shared what turned out to be a common interest and the beginning of a literary collaboration and a marriage - the concept of the crime novel as a mirror to society. Together they planned a series, to consist of ten books, which they said would trace ‘a man’s [Martin Beck’s] personality changing over the years, as the milieu and the atmosphere, the political climate, the economic climate, and the crime rate change. . . . ‘ Begun in 1965 with ROSEANNA and ending in 1975 with Per Wahloo’s death and the completion of the tenth book, THE TERRORISTS, the Martin Beck series has come to represent a unique achievement in the field of mystery fiction. The books, originally written in Swedish, have been published in every major country and have won many awards, including the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar for the best mystery novel of 1970 (THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN). The Wahloos have been hailed as ‘the reigning king and queen of mystery fiction.’
Also, the following book about the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme is pretty interesting…
Blood On The Snow: The Killing Of Olof Palme by Jan Bondeson. Ithaca. 2005. Cornell University Press. 233 pages. Jacket design and front-cover photograph by Scott Levine. 0801442117
The Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, a major figure in world politics and an ardent opponent of apartheid, was shot dead on the streets of Stockholm in February 1986. At the time of his death, Palme was deeply involved in Middle East diplomacy and was working under UN auspices to end the Iran–Iraq war. Across Scandinavia, Palme’s killing had an impact similar to that of the Kennedy assassinations in the United States—and it ignited nearly as many conspiracy theories. Interest in the Palme slaying was most recently stirred by reports of the death of Christer Pettersson, who was tried for the murder twice, convicted the first time, and then acquitted on appeal. In his investigative account of Palme’s still-unsolved murder, the historian Jan Bondeson meticulously recreates the assassination and its aftermath. Like the best works of crime fiction, this book puts the victim and his death into social context. Bondeson’s work, however, is noteworthy for its dispassionate treatment of police incompetence: the police did not answer a witness’s phone call reporting the murder just 45 seconds after it occurred, and further time was lost as the police sought to confirm that someone had actually been shot. When the police arrived on the scene, they did not even recognize the victim as the Prime Minister. This early confusion was emblematic of the errors that were to follow. Bondeson demolishes the various conspiracy theories that have been devised to make sense of the killing, before suggesting a convincing explanation of his own. A brilliant piece of investigative journalism, Blood on the Snow includes crime-scene photographs and reconstructions that have never before been published and offers a gripping narrative of a crime that shocked a continent.
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