MIND'S EYE by Hakan Nesser

Janek Mitter wakes up to find his wife Eva dead in the bathtub after a night of serious drinking for the two of them.  Janek is certain that he did not kill his wife, but he cannot remember what happened the previous evening.  He soon finds himself arrested and convicted but is placed in a mental institution.  Inspector Van Veeteren has a hunch that Janek is not the murderer, and a subsequent murder convinces him completely.  Since Eva and Janek both taught at the same school, Van Veeteren and his staff spend a good deal of investigative energy checking out the alibis of the school’s employees and students.  They also drop in on some of Eva’s old friends and discover several deaths in Eva’s realm—her father, a classmate, and her young son.  Are these deaths, originally ruled as accidents, really homicides related to Eva’s?  I enjoyed the speedy pace of this novel, which accelerates toward the end when Van Veeteren sets his own deadline by booking a vacation trip to Australia, and I have no complaints about the writing, the translation, or the dialog.  However, none of the characters came sufficiently to life for me, perhaps because they all seem to be loners to some degree.  The novel is driven by the quest to solve the crime, rather than any sympathy for the police or the victims.