by Kjell Eriksson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020
The heroine’s eighth case uses a clever whodunit to treat contemporary issues with complexity and compassion.
A pair of arsons and a handful of murders lead investigators into the dark world of young Swedish neo-Nazis.
Upon retiring from the Violent Crimes Unit, veteran detective Ann Lindell leaves Uppsala for a rural cottage where she plans to make cheese. But when an anonymous caller warns police that “someone may die,” Lindell’s successor, Sammy Nilsson, decides to consult her. In the interim, a rural school attended by many Afghan refugees is burned to the ground, and some students go missing. Was this the subject of the anonymous call? As usual, Eriksson folds the lives of his engaging detectives into the mystery. A disillusioned Sammy contemplates separation from his wife, Angelika, and deals with his erratic new partner, Bodin, while Lindell rekindles a friendship with her ex, Edvard. Eriksson’s nuanced portraits of suspects and witnesses add depth and texture. Villager Gösta Friberg recognizes one of the arsonists, and a couple of others have strong suspicions. Falsely telling Sammy that she can’t identify the caller, Lindell decides to probe on her own. Soon after she questions Gösta and others, a dead badger is left gutted in her bed. When she goes to the city to question Justus Johsson, the man on the tape, he advises her to investigate young Swedish Nazis. Then there’s a second fire at a farmhouse owned by suspected Nazi Daniel Mattsson. A female corpse is discovered inside the burned house, but where is Mattsson?
The heroine’s eighth case uses a clever whodunit to treat contemporary issues with complexity and compassion.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-25-076614-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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by Kjell Eriksson ; translated by Paul Norlen
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Benjamin Stevenson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 17, 2023
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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