Translated from Swedish 2011
I had such a good time reading Stieg Larsson’s Girl with a
Dragon Tattoo before it became popular in the U.S., I thought I would ask the
Stockholm bookstore worker for a suggestion for the next good book from Sweden
that has been translated into English. She gave me a choice of two detective
novels and I chose the one written by a woman. It had a Stieg Larsson feel, with
unusual detective work, abusive childhoods and quite deep evil, maybe not the
energy I was looking for, but engaging enough that I have completed the book
the day after purchasing it.
We get many people’s intertwined stories – both personal and
professional. We meet the criminal in the first page, but don’t find out who he
is until the very end. Then we meet witnesses of the first crime, slowly we
meet all the detectives and related police staff, the families of the victims,
those associated with the criminal. It ends up being a richly woven story of
varied lives and relationships. My favorite is Frederika, possibly modeled on
the author’s own experience, if I understood correctly from the
acknowledgements in the back, of her work as a civilian working together with
police and detectives. Fredrika is educated and can put together a lot of
details, not just look at the most obvious suspect. She wants to keep emotion
out of her job and is criticized by her male colleagues for not having enough
gut feelings for the job. Obviously, she proves them wrong, but it is
interesting to watch the process and as they become a team. I also liked her
solution to her personal life – not ideal, but one way of living. Other
characters were dealing with various family problems too. The hardest was to
read about the crimes against the children. When the book was suggested to me,
she said it was scary, and that was true, but in crime novels there is a
crime, just like thrillers have their share of shooting. In small doses good
reads.
