Tag: Sweden

Day 175: Death Angels

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Cover for Death AngelsAlthough Death Angels is the fourth of Åke Edwardson’s books to be published in the United States, it is the first book in his Erik Winter series. I felt that this mystery flagged in the middle, although the beginning and ending were interesting.

Young men are murdered in a similar way in Sweden and London, so Erik Winter and his team get together with their London counterparts to solve the crime. When they begin to suspect that the murders may be connected with snuff films, Winter asks a childhood friend with ties to illicit porn for help. A break finally comes when a burglar reports seeing some blood-stained clothing in a house he’s broken into.

As I mentioned before, nothing much seems to happen in the middle of the book. It appears that some of the Scandinavian mystery writers are at pains to show realistically how long it takes to solve some crimes. This objective is a worthy one, but they need to also find a way to build suspense or keep the reader’s interest. The characters of the members of Winter’s team are not well developed, although an attempt is made to show other aspects of their lives. However, I especially disliked the subplot of the young cop with a pregnant wife who gets involved with a stripper.

Day 153: The Shadow Woman

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Cover for The Shadow WomanIn The Shadow Woman, a woman is found dead in a park during the Gothenburg Party, a citywide festival that is taking place during a blazing summer. Chief Inspector Erik Winter and his team are having a hard time finding leads or even identifying the body. All they have is footage from a surveillance camera of a Ford Escort and a strange symbol painted on a nearby tree.

Sandwiched into the criminal investigation is the narration of a little girl who doesn’t know where her mommy is and is being kept by strangers. When Winter’s team finally identifies the body, they find that the woman had a little girl. No one seems to know where the child is.

During an investigation that lasts months, Winter and his team begin to find links between the crime and a robbery that occurred 25 years ago. In the meantime, Winter’s long-time girlfriend Angela is thinking of giving him an ultimatum about their relationship.

I haven’t been reading Åke Edwardson’s Erik Winter mysteries in order, making the private lives of the recurring characters a little difficult to follow. The books keep my interest and provide complex puzzles, but I still don’t feel like I get much insight into the personalities of the main characters. The slower pace of Edwardson’s police procedurals is probably more realistic than the speed with which crimes are usually solved in fiction, but the author’s ability to effectively build suspense is also affected by this pace.

Day 150: The Torso

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Cover for The TorsoThe Torso is a pedestrian police procedural by Helene Tursten. A torso washes up on a Swedish beach. The investigation finds that a similar murder occurred in Copenhagen, so Detective Irene Huss travels there to consult with the Danish police. Victims are being strangled and then after death dismembered and their organs removed. Not only are the leads to the murderer few, but the police are having difficulty identifying the original torso.

The novel is ploddingly written with no particular suspense. The characters all remain sketchily depicted except Huss, and her every thought is recorded, no matter how mundane. Unfortunately, many of her thoughts are mundane. Every character is thoroughly described including each person’s changes of outfits.

Speaking of Huss’s thoughts, despite having a loving husband and two teenage daughters, she seems to be prepared at one point to launch into an affair with a Danish policeman without any thought at all for her family.

My biggest negative reaction has to do with unlikeliness in the investigation. Perhaps police procedure is different in Sweden than here, but I was surprised to find the coroner providing a profiler lecture based upon one examination of the body and a lot of supposition. For example, there is an assumption throughout that the organs are removed to be eaten, even though there is no proof of that. In addition, the reactions of Huss and other offficers to some sights and remarks seem to be implausibly squeamish, considering their positions. It also seems implausible to me that the team would retain the obnoxious alcoholic cop Jonny, who seems to be incompetent to boot. Rather than assume Swedish procedure and police behavior is that different, I am inclined to believe that Tursten doesn’t know anything about criminal investigations.

Finally, the denoument of the novel is anticlimactic. The murderer has been stalking Huss, so we might expect a terrifying finale. No such thing happens. Although the novel is clearly meant to appeal to those who like dark, gruesome fiction, it completely fails to provide any suspense or atmosphere.

Day 142: The Man from Beijing

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Cover for The Man from BeijingBefore I read The Man from Beijing, I heard it was really good, but I personally think Henning Mankell is better when he restrains the scope of his novels and refrains from long political discussions. This novel is not one of Mankell’s Kurt Wallander mysteries, but a stand-alone.

Almost everyone in a small village in remote Sweden is brutally murdered. Judge Birgitta Roslin figures out that one elderly couple was her mother’s foster parents, so she decides to go to the village and investigate.

The police are quickly convinced that the murderer is a local petty criminal, but Roslin finds diaries written by an immigrant ancestor of one of the elderly victims that she thinks may provide clues to the crime. Roslin’s story is periodically interrupted by a flashback describing the events following a man’s kidnapping in China in 1863 after he is brought to America to work on the railroad.

In the meantime, Ya Ru, a powerful Chinese businessman, is plotting a further acquisition of power and waiting to hear about the revenge he planned against the family of a man who harmed his ancestor. The novel travels to China, London, and Africa. It involves political plotting and maneuvering, corruption, and racism.

I thought the motive for the original murders was ridiculous. I also found many of the characters to be one-dimensional.

This novel is the second stand-alone I have read by Mankell, but unusually for me (because I often tire of series mysteries), I have preferred the Wallander novels. Both stand-alone novels are set partially in Africa, where Mankell lives part of the year. This novel is an improvement on the other one, which I thought was poorly written and extremely depressing, but it still has major flaws.

Day 128: Echoes from the Dead

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Cover for Echoes from the DeadEchoes from the Dead is another terrific book by Johan Theorin. It is his first book, and reading it explained a few minor points about The Darkest Room for me.

Julia’s young son Jens disappeared on the island of Öland in 1972, but her father just received a package containing the little boy’s sandal. After Julia’s father takes his friends Ernst and John along to look into what happened to her son, Ernst is found dead.

For years the island’s inhabitants have heard rumors of the return of Nils Kant, a notorious murderer who disappeared just after World War II. We readers know that these two stories are connected, but not how.  Although we also know who took Jens, we don’t understand what really happened to him until the very end of the book.

Julia returns to Oland to try to figure out what happened to Jens, if she can. After years of depression, she begins to take more of an interest in life and maybe to fall in love with Lennart, the island policeman.

This novel is not as atmospheric as The Darkest Room, but it is full of characters that you begin to know. The plot is complex, interleaved with the story of what actually happened to Nils Kant back in the past.

Day 108: The Cruel Stars of the Night

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Cover for The Cruel Stars of the NightThe Cruel Stars of the Night is Kjell Eriksson’s second mystery featuring Ann Lindell but the first one I read. Although the series is labeled Ann Lindell mysteries, the novels actually feature an ensemble cast of characters and take awhile to develop the personalities of the team in the Uppsala Violent Crime Division.

The chapters in this novel alternate between the investigations of the Violent Crime Division into suspicious incidents involving old men and the thoughts and experiences of Laura Hindersten, whose father is missing. After awhile, having information not available to the investigators, you realize how the two narrations are linked, but the team takes longer to connect the dots.

One of the two suspicious deaths of elderly men is that of Petrus Blomgren. He wrote a suicide note, but he was murdered before he could kill himself. The police are sure that Laura Hindersten’s father, a professor and Petrarch scholar, will turn up, but she is convinced that something horrible has happened to him.

The novel makes for an interesting enough story, although the only fully developed character is that of the serial killer. I am interested in reading more, though, and getting to know Lindell and her coworkers Sammy Nilsson, Allan Fredericksson, and Stig Franklin, better.

Day 95: The Girl Who Played with Fire

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Cover for The Girl Who Played with FireThe Girl Who Played with Fire is the second in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy. As the transitional book between the first and third, it is not quite up to the level of the first book; however, it is still exciting. The first time I read it, I was riveted, but on my reread, I noticed a few occasions where the writing was more journalistic than desirable. Nevertheless, it is still a real thriller and absolutely essential to read if you are going to finish the trilogy.

Lisbeth Salander’s visit to her evil guardian upon her return from her travels abroad creates a conspiracy against her. Her guardian is tired of toeing the line and decides to have her killed.

Mikael Blomqvist is soon investigating a crime, too. He has been working with a freelance journalist, Dag Svensson, to publish a piece on sex trafficking. When he stops by one evening, he finds Svensson and his girlfriend, Mia Johansson, recently shot dead.

As the investigation proceeds, Salander’s guardian is also murdered, and the police discover links to the murders of Svensson and Johansson. Lisbeth Salander finds she is being framed for all the murders, despite her never having met Svensson or Johansson.

Blomqvist is convinced that Salander is innocent. With Salander hiding out and following the leads from her side, Blomqvist tries to figure out who Svensson may have been investigating that resulted in his murder.

Day 60: Mind’s Eye

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Cover for Mind's EyeMind’s Eye is the first of the Inspector Van Veteren series by Swedish mystery writer Håkan Nesser, although it is the third published in English. Mostly a police procedural, the book also is somewhat of a psychological thriller.

A woman is drowned in her bath tub and her husband, Janek Mitter, is on trial for her murder, but Inspector Van Veteren is not quite sure the police got it right. Mitter, whose only alibi is that he was asleep and who cannot remember what happened that night, is found guilty and incarcerated in a mental hospital.

One night when Mitter is not given his drugs, he remembers someone in his house the night of the murder and trieds to call Van Veteren. He also sends a note to that person. That night he is murdered. Now Van Veteren thinks the police need to start over by examining the woman’s past.

The book was interesting enough, and I am ready to read more about Van Veteren. I was able to guess the solution–although not the exact identity of the murderer–well before the end, but the book kept my attention.

Day 44: The Dogs of Riga

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Cover for The Dogs of RigaHenning Mankell was my introduction to Swedish crime fiction. I usually enjoy his mysteries, but have not really liked his “more serious” novels. The Dogs of Riga is another of his mysteries featuring Inspector Kurt Wallender.

In a novel set earlier in time than his previous mysteries, Wallender travels to Latvia in the days before the dissolution of the Soviet Union to discover why Major Liepa, a Latvian police inspector who has been working on a case with him, is murdered as soon as he returns home. Wallender is bewildered by the politics and workings of the deeply depressed country. He soon figures out that the person arrested for the murder is innocent.

Wallender responds to the pleas for help by Liepa’s widow, Baipa Liepa, to continue his investigation further than the Latvian officials want him to. He encounters widespread governmental corruption and the realities of living in this grim regime. Readers of Mankell’s books have heard of Baipa Liepa, because she is the woman he loves in books that take place in a later timeframe.

Wallender is his usual depressed self, eating bad food and getting little sleep. The setting of urban Riga, though, is much more dark than Mankell’s usual setting of rural Sweden.

I enjoyed the book, although I thought that Wallender seemed strikingly naive at times. Mankell’s writing is sometimes a little awkward, although it is usually spare and transparent.

Day 32: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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Cover for The Girl with the Dragon TattooBest Book of Week 7!

Maybe everyone has read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. But if you are one of the few who have not, you are missing an exciting thriller.

Editor and writer Mikael Blomkvist has just lost a libel case brought by a billionaire industrialist named Wennerström concerning Blomkvist’s allegations of corruption. Blomkvist has been sentenced to three months in prison. He had carefully checked his facts but then one of his witnesses recanted. In order to separate his magazine, Millenium, from this problem, he resigns.

After he gets out of jail, he is approached for a job by Henrik Vanger, the retired head of Vanger Corporation. Vanger wants Blomkvist to find out what happened to his great-niece Harriet, who disappeared off the family’s private island 36 years earlier during a day when the island was cut off from the mainland by an accident blocking the only bridge. He is afraid that some member of his family murdered her. He yearly receives a pressed flower on his niece’s birthday and believes the killer is expressing remorse through this means.

Although Blomkvist is initially reluctant, he eventually accepts the job and goes to live on the island. When he decides he needs a research assistant, Vanger’s lawyer connects him with Lisbeth Salander, a child-sized woman who dresses in a goth style and has a dragon tattoo.

Salander is a computer genius with a difficult past. When she was a teenager, she was institutionalized and is still under the care of a legal guardian, who controls her money and can have her institutionalized at any time. She is hostile and uncommunicative, and few people have bothered to try to get to know her. After her guardian has a stroke, he is replaced by Nils Bjurman, who uses his position to sexually abuse her.

Bjurman has seriously misjudged Salander, however, and she takes care of this problem in one of the most satisfying scenes of the novel.

As Blomkvist and Salander investigate Harriet Vanger’s disappearance, they begin to believe that they may be on the track of a serial killer. Ultimately, Blomkvist finds himself in grave danger.

With a complex, interesting plot, an engaging hero and formidable heroine, a slew of interesting characters, and a sense of Swedish politics and law, you will lap up this book and go looking for the next one. Larsson was an activist with strong feelings about violence against women, a theme in all of his books.