Gunnar Barbarotti Books in Order

The Gunnar Barbarotti novels follow a Swedish police inspector of Italian descent who lives in the fictional town of Kymlinge. Barbarotti is middle‑aged, stubbornly curious, and unusually preoccupied with whether there is a higher power paying attention to his work. He even keeps a private scorecard, awarding or docking points to God when fate seems to intervene in his cases. (en.wikipedia.org)

The series opens in The Darkest Day, when a large family gathers in December to celebrate two milestone birthdays. By the end of the weekend two members of the Hermansson clan have vanished, and Barbarotti must pick apart old grudges, rivalries and secrets to understand what really happened in the snow‑bound town. The investigation feels as much like an X‑ray of a modern family as a traditional police procedural. (panmacmillan.com)

Later books keep that mix of crime plot and everyday life. In The Root of Evil, Barbarotti begins receiving letters that announce murders before they happen, pulling him into a cat‑and‑mouse game with a killer whose motives reach back to a long‑ago holiday in France. The Secret Life of Mr Roos follows Valdemar Roos, a weary office worker whose secret lottery win and hidden hut in the countryside lead to an encounter with a young woman on the run and, eventually, a body in the woods. (panmacmillan.com)

In The Lonely Ones, the series stretches across decades. A group of students meet in Uppsala in 1969, travel behind the Iron Curtain and experience something that fractures their friendships. Many years later a lecturer is found dead at the same cliff where one of those students once died, and Barbarotti must work out how the past and present deaths connect. (panmacmillan.com)

The final book, The Axe Woman, is more of a cold‑case puzzle. After a personal tragedy, Barbarotti returns to work and is handed the file of Arnold Morinder, an electrician who disappeared years earlier, leaving only his abandoned moped. Arnold’s partner, Ellen Bjarnebo, is infamous for having killed and dismembered her abusive first husband with an axe. When Ellen cannot be found either, the old case starts to thaw in dangerous ways. (panmacmillan.com)

Across the books, Kymlinge is drawn as a quiet Swedish town where people know far more about each other than they say. Nesser uses familiar Nordic‑noir elements – dark winters, remote farms, summer houses in the woods – but lets the stories linger on conversations, inner lives and moral choices as much as on forensic detail. Barbarotti’s colleague and later partner Eva Backman provides a grounded counterweight to his more philosophical streak, and the banter between them keeps even the darkest cases human. (nesser.se)

Readers who enjoy character‑driven crime, long arcs that follow a detective’s personal life, and cases where old sins resurface years later tend to connect with this series. The books can be read as standalones, but together they chart Barbarotti’s shifting faith, his relationships, and his sense of what justice can fairly demand from flawed people.