The Fire Engine That Disappeared
The Story of a Crime | A Martin Beck Police Story
The Martin Beck Police Mysteries: Book #5
- By: Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö, Colin Dexter & Joan Tate
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 7 hours 11 minutes
Description
Gunvald Larsson sits carefully observing the dingy Stockholm apartment of a man under police surveillance. He looks at his watch: nine minutes past eleven in the evening. At that same moment, the house explodes, killing at least three people. Chief Inspector Martin Beck and his men don’t suspect arson or murder until they discover a peculiar circumstance linking the explosion to a suicide committed that same day. The dead man left a note consisting of just two words: Martin Beck.
This is the excellent next installment of the genre-pioneering Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s, widely recognized as the greatest masterpieces of crime fiction ever written.
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The Martin Beck Police Mysteries Series

Roseanna
By: Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö, Henning Mankell & Lois Roth
Narrated by: Tom Weiner
Length: 6 hours 36 minutes
Abridged: No
On a July afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from Sweden’s beautiful Lake Vättern. Three months later, all that Police Inspector Martin Beck knows is that her name is Roseanna, that she came from Lincoln, Nebraska, and that she could have been strangled by any one of eighty-five people. As the melancholic Beck narrows down the list... Read more »
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The Man Who Went Up in Smoke
By: Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö & Joan Tate
Narrated by: Tom Weiner
Length: 5 hours 34 minutes
Abridged: No
His holiday with his family has just begun, but a phone call sends Martin Beck packing off to Budapest, where a boorish journalist has vanished without a trace. With the aid of the coolly efficient local police, who do business while soaking at the public baths, Beck must troll about in the Eastern Europe underworld for a man nobody knows—while... Read more »
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The Man on the Balcony
By: Per Wahlöö, Maj Sjöwall & Alan Blair
Narrated by: Tom Weiner
Length: 5 hours 33 minutes
Abridged: No
Someone is killing young girls in the once peaceful parks of Stockholm—killing them after “having his way” with them. The people of Stockholm are tense and fearful. Police Superintendent Martin Beck has two witnesses: a cold-blooded mugger who won’t say much and a three-year-old boy who can’t say much. The dedicated work of the police force... Read more »
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The Laughing Policeman
By: Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö & Alan Blair
Narrated by: Tom Weiner
Length: 6 hours 42 minutes
Abridged: No
On a cold and rainy Stockholm night, nine bus riders are gunned down by an unknown assassin. The press, anxious for an explanation for the seemingly random crime, quickly dubs the killer a madman. But Superintendent Martin Beck of the Stockholm Homicide Squad suspects otherwise: this apparently motiveless killer has managed to target one of... Read more »
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The Fire Engine That Disappeared
By: Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö, Colin Dexter & Joan Tate
Narrated by: Tom Weiner
Length: 7 hours 11 minutes
Abridged: No
Gunvald Larsson sits carefully observing the dingy Stockholm apartment of a man under police surveillance. He looks at his watch: nine minutes past eleven in the evening. At that same moment, the house explodes, killing at least three people. Chief Inspector Martin Beck and his men don’t suspect arson or murder until they discover a peculiar... Read more »
Learn more
Murder at the Savoy
By: Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö, Joan Tate & Michael Carlson
Narrated by: Tom Weiner
Length: 6 hours 32 minutes
Abridged: No
When Viktor Palmgren, a powerful industrialist, is shot during an after-dinner speech, the repercussions—both on the international money markets and on the residents of the small coastal town of Malmö—are widespread. Chief Inspector Martin Beck is called in to help catch a killer nobody, not even the victim, was able to identify. He begins a... Read more »
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The Abominable Man
By: Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö & Thomas Teal
Narrated by: Tom Weiner
Length: 5 hours 29 minutes
Abridged: No
Martin Beck faces one of the greatest challenges of his professional life when his investigation unearths evidence of police corruption and brutality in this incredible seventh novel in the Martin Beck mystery series.
The bloody murder of a police captain in his hospital room exposes the particularly unsavory history of a man who spent forty... Read more »
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The Locked Room
By: Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö & Paul Britten Austin
Narrated by: Tom Weiner
Length: 8 hours 29 minutes
Abridged: No
The eighth classic installment in this genre-changing Martin Beck series of novels starring Detective Inspector Martin Beck is a masterful take on a classic locked-room mystery.
A young blonde in sunglasses robs a bank and kills a hapless citizen. Across town, a corpse with a bullet shot through its heart is found in a locked room—with no gun at... Read more »
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Cop Killer
By: Per Wahlöö, Maj Sjöwall & Thomas Teal
Narrated by: Tom Weiner
Length: 8 hours 8 minutes
Abridged: No
In the penultimate installment of this masterful crime-fiction series, Martin Beck, now head of the National Murder Squad, is called in to a sleepy part of the countryside to investigate a woman’s disappearance. What Beck doesn’t know is that the woman has already been murdered, her body dumped in a swamp. At the same time, a midnight shoot-out... Read more »
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The Terrorists
By: Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö & Joan Tate
Narrated by: Tom Weiner
Length: 9 hours
Abridged: No
The Terrorists is the last Martin Beck mystery, finished just a few weeks before Per Wahlöö’s death. The book is, in effect, a marvelous summing up of the series. 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... Read more »
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