Previously published: New York : Pantheon Books, 1970.

"Originally published with introduction in Great Britain by Harper Perennial, London 2007."--T.p. verso.

"A Martin Beck police mystery"--Cover.

"The cunning incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the building's eleven occupants. And if one of Martin Beck's colleagues hadn't been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe since-for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain-a regulation firetruck has vanished. Was it terrorism, suicide, or simply a gas leak? And what, if anything, did the explosion have to do with the peculiar death earlier that day of a forty-six-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: 'Martin Beck' ?"--Fantastic fiction.

Translation of: Brandbilen som försvann.