Roseanna

Roseanna is a mystery novel by the Swedish writers Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, published in 1965 as the first installment in their ten-book Martin Beck series of police procedurals. The novel follows Stockholm police detective Martin Beck and his colleagues through a slow, methodical investigation after the body of a young American tourist, Roseanna McGraw, is dredged from the Gota Canal, tracing her identity through international cooperation with Interpol before narrowing in on a fellow passenger from the canal boat tour where she died. Sjowall and Wahloo conceived their ten-book series as a sustained social critique of Swedish society delivered through the conventions of police procedural fiction, and Roseanna's patient, unglamorous depiction of detective work is widely credited with establishing the modern Scandinavian crime novel as an internationally influential genre.