Mind's Eye
By Hakan Nesser
288 pages. Pantheon.

Snappish, sardonic, unsentimental, depressed, and quite possibly psychic, Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is the most appealingly unlovable hero since TV's crabby physician House. What Makes Mind's Eye (Pantheon), by Swedish crime writer Hakan Nesser, such a surprising read is less the cleverness of the plot (a beautiful woman found dead in her bathtub, a husband devoid of memory of the event) than the way Nesser, a deft anatomist of character, exposes the self-inflicted wounds of the heart.