Centered on an elderly retiree and his intellectual adversary, the shrewd Inspector Lebeda, "Case Closed" is filled with all the expected elements of a thriller--murder, rape, suicide!--but soon reveals itself as a wily and sophisticated parable about the dangers of language itself, in which the author takes aim at human nature with a devastating arsenal of genre-mixing, wordplay, and whimsical, biting satire.

Following the success of 2005 s Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, Patrik Our edni k again confounds expectations with what seems, on the surface, to be a detective novel...