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In 1793 Stockholm, one character says that Hell would be a welcome relief to the misery of life. All the children are starving to death. All the women are forced into prostitution in order to get enough food to live until they die of syphilis. Many of the few men who survived pointless wars are wounded. Thousands die of some plague or other every few years. All the watchmen (police) are corrupt. All government officials and churchmen are corrupt and hypocritical. All the water is polluted with excrement. Everywhere there is excrement in piles and the air reeks even in winter. Why the population of Stockholm is not declining rapidly is never explained. An honest watchman, the one-handed Mickel Cardell, is guilted into entering the sewage infested harbor water to recover a body. The body is an unidentified human with no eyes, tongue, or limbs. Cecil Winge, an honest police detective dyeing of TB, wants to find the murderer before he dies and gets Cardell to help him. They discover that the murderer has inflicted far more pain on the victim than “mere” dismemberment. As if this is not depressing enough, hundreds of pages are devoted to the miseries of minor characters before revealing a clue or two about the murderer. One of these side stories introduces a character who gets more pleasure from crippling or killing young women than he does from sex, and no one does anything about him. Enough is enough. The more a reader reads of this book, the more damaged his humanity will become and the more depressed he will get.