In the second installment in the best-selling Detective Varg series, Ulf and his team investigate a notorious philanderer—a wolf of a man whose bad reputation may be all bark and no bite.   The Department of Sensitive Crimes, renowned for taking on the most obscure and irrelevant cases is always prepared to dive into an investigation, no matter how complex. So when the girlfriend of an infamous author who insists her bad-boy beau is being blackmailed approaches Ulf Varg, the department’s lead detective, Ulf is determined to help. It’s rather difficult to determine what skeletons hide in the hard-living lothario’s closet, though. And while Swedes are notoriously tolerant . . . well, there are limits. Even for the Swedish.   The case requires Ulf’s total concentration, but he finds himself distracted by his ongoing attraction to his co-worker, Anna, whose own fears about her husband’s fidelity are causing a strain on her marriage. When Ulf is also tasked with looking into a group of dealers exporting wolves that seem more canis familiaris than canis lupus, it will require all of his team’s investigative instincts and dogged persistence to put these matters to bed. "Cheerful or melancholy, irritated or resigned, Detective Varg gives the reader more dry wit, inspired whimsy and comic pleasure than any other Swedish investigator in the business." —Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal   "McCall Smith’s deceptively sharp wit is ever-present. . . . There is much to enjoy in this book." — The Scotsman  (UK)   "Alexander McCall Smith makes the irrelevant relevant. . . .[a] witty tongue-in-cheek examination of the routine." — The Charlotte Sun   "McCall Smith’s great gift is making you shelve your genre-honed expectations and accept his people and stories as they are." — Kirkus Reviews ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH is the author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels and of a number of other series and stand-alone books. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and have been best sellers throughout the world. He lives in Scotland. Chapter One ENLARGED PORES   Ulf Varg, of the Department of Sensitive Crimes, drove his silver-grey Saab through a landscape of short distances. He was heading for a psychotherapeutic day at a rural wellness cen­tre, and the drive, he thought, was part of the therapy. Southern Sweden lay before him, parcelled out into farms that had been in the ownership of the same families for generations. Here and there, dots of white amidst the green, were the houses of the people who worked this land. They were settled people, of long memories and equally long jealousies, whose metaphorical horizons stopped where the sky met the land, which sometimes seemed only a stone’s throw away; who had never gone anywhere very much, and who had no desire to do so.   He thought of the life these people led, which was so different from his own in Malmö. Nothing was particularly urgent here; nobody had targets to meet, or reports to write. There would be no talk of inputs and outputs and communicative objectives. Most people worked for themselves and no other; they knew what their neighbours would say, about any subject, as they had heard it all before, time upon time, and it was all as familiar as the weather. They knew, too, exactly who liked, or disliked, whom; they knew who was not be trusted; who had done what, years back, and what the consequences had been. It would be simple to be a policeman here, thought Ulf, as there were no secrets to speak of. You would know about crimes almost before they were committed, although there would be few of those. People here were law-abiding and conformist, leading lives that ran narrowly and correctly to the grave—and they knew where that grave would be, right next to those of their parents and their parents’ parents.   Ulf opened his car window and took a deep breath: the coun­try air bore notes of something floral—gorse, he thought, or the flowering trees of an orchard that ran beside the road. Trees were not his strong point, and Ulf could never remember which fruit tree was which, although he believed that he was now in apple-growing country—or was it peach? Whatever it might be, it was in blossom, a little later than usual, he had heard, because spring had been slow in Sweden that year. Everything had been slow, in fact, including promotion. Ulf had been told—unofficially—that he was in line for advancement within Malmö’s Department of Sensitive Crimes, but that had been months ago and nothing had come of it since then.   It had been a bad idea to spend the anticipated rise in salary on the purchase of a new living-room suite, especially one that was upholstered in soft Florentine leather. It had been ruinously expensive, and when his salary remained obstinately the same, he had been obliged to transfer funds out of his savings account into his current account in order to cover the cost. Ulf hated doing that, as he