We are in Sweden. It is summer. It’s beautiful, life is easy. A young couple is vacationing in a remote farmhouse. Beth and Ulf. A teacher, a journalist. They are alone, in love. The strawberries are in season, the wine is good, the sun shines. Life is so good it can’t get much better.

Then, a stranger enters the scene. At the wrong time, looking the wrong way; a bit scary. Beth reacts quickly. Overreacts, actually. And kills the man with her axe. There is blood everywhere. And a body. The body of an unknown man. A cat is looking at them. Now what?

Beth and Ulf start on their way to self-destruction. Bad decisions followed by poor choices. Mostly choices driven by their preference to avoid pain, problems and complications. Their life had so far been nice, orderly, and pretty. They would very much like it to continue to be nice, orderly, and pretty. Why should something that happened in a matter of seconds, something meaningless, odd, so totally not them, not at all what they wanted, be allowed to impact their life? They bury the body behind the farmhouse. So, no body, no problem…right?

Inger Frimansson is a wonderful writer and a master of the psychological thriller genre. In The Cat Did Not Die we once again meet a seemingly harmonious idyll where something awful accidentally enters and then completely pollutes it. A new, morbid, odd, twisted reality increasingly replaces the harmony, wiggles its way to the front, and imprisons the actors in a drama where the choices become increasingly restrained.

Frimansson writes in a clear, concise, suggestive and understated style. She is a bestselling author in Scandinavia, and has received the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers Award for Best Mystery for Good Night, My Darling and for The Shadow in the Water. She is very skillful at building tension. In The Cat Did Not Die she also – as in some of her other books – uses the cat as an omen, a symbol, to great effect.

The Cat Did Not Die is both interesting and entertaining, masterfully illuminating the doom that can sometimes reside in the smallest of details and gradually, but ever so carefully, grow its destructive influence. It is a masterful crime fiction novel by Frimansson – one of Scandinavia’s best pens.

Links to books by Inger Frimansson at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

Nordic Noir is fittingly subtitled The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film and TV. So it is pretty wide – Nordic Noir in all media. It is an interesting book for people who love Scandinavian crime fiction or who wants to get an overview of what is going on in there. I consider it a useful handbook.

It is divided into eight chapters: 1. Beginning: Sjöwall & Wahlöö’s Martin Beck Series, 2. Sweden’s Trojan Horse: Kurt Wallander, 3. Lisbeth Salander’s Legacy, 4. Larsson’s Rivals, 5. The New King: Jo Nesbo and Other Norwegians, 6. Dark Nights in Iceland and Finland, 7. Darkness in Denmark, 8. The Nordic Screen: Film and TV Adaptations. In addition to an Introduction, an Epilogue (Some Names to Watch For), three Appendices: Top Twenty Nordic Noir Novels, Top Six Noir Films, and Top Six Noir TV Dramas, plus an Index.

Barry Forshaw, the author, is a British journalist working with Scandinavian crime fiction, and the book shows that. It contains a variety of types of information from a variety of sources: notes, reviews, observations, conversations with authors and translators, small stories, background information, gossip, insights from the publishing business. It is a little of this, a little of that, sort of semi-organized, loosely structured; somehow held together by the loose organizing principles visible in the list of chapters: a little chronology, a little geography basically. The result is interesting, useful and information-packed.

In the end what is expressed in Nordic Noir are the views of Barry Forshaw: both in the content and in the organization. I agree with some of them, I think others are quite odd. For instance: He spends pages on Sara Blaedel (uninteresting, largely unknown except in Scandinavia and abroad), but barely mentions Leif GW Persson – literally a pop star among crime writers in Sweden, best-selling throughout Scandinavia, several prizes. I don’t know or understand why? Maybe Forshaw has met Blaedel and likes her? Who knows?

Despite oddities, some factual errors here and there, and despite the fact that Forshaw seemingly doesn’t read in any of the Scandinavian languages but relies on secondary sources a lot, it is still quite an impressive and interesting book. Anglo readers interested in the Scandinavian Noir landscape will, I am sure, find Nordic Noir very intriguing and useful!

Links to books by Barry Forshaw at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

The Gingerbread House is the first book in English by the Swedish author Carin Gerhardsen. She has a background in mathematics and has worked as a computer scientist. This novel is the first in her The Hammarby Series, which is very popular in Scandinavia and features Detective Inspector Conny Sjöberg and his group in the Stockholm police. So far five novels have been published in this series in Sweden.

The title, The Gingerbread House, sounds kind of cozy. But this is not a cozy book. Far from it, it is actually quite raw and brutal. In the novel Gerhardsen lets loose a murderer with deep psychological scars from childhood abuse. In a very short span of time, several bestial murders take place in Stockholm. Soon it becomes clear that there is a serial killer out there. Are the murders completely random, or is there some common factor that links the victims to one another?

The story in this wonderful crime fiction novel is scary and brutal, but even so it is quite believable. It is well-told and in many ways evocative. It explores the uninhibited cruelty of children and the deep wounds thoughtless acts may create, and how such scars over time may grow and take possession of even grown-up minds when the conditions are right. Gerhardsen is a great observer and her descriptions are almost too good and to the point. Her characters are very authentic and interesting.

I enjoyed reading The Gingerbread House. It made me think, was entertaining, quite suspenseful and had some plot twists that completely surprised me. I liked Detective Inspector Conny Sjöberg and his team, and will be looking forward to the next book in this series!

Links to books by Carin Gerhardsen at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Even though he probably drinks more than he talks, Finnish police inspector Kari Vaara has a number of traits that make him sort of likable. Perhaps because he is concerned with justice and fairness, albeit in a twisted sort of a way? Perhaps because he thinks of himself as incorruptible and honest, even though he has been known to steal? Or perhaps because he is so full of contradictions – so strong, so frail, so weak, so hard and so loving – because he is so human? I don’t quite know.

However, having followed James Thompson’s great series about this so typically Finnish policeman from its beginning in Snow Angels, it is clear that Thompson is very hard on his hero. In most ways, and surely in the ways that count the most, Kari Vaara’s life has been a continuous downward spiral in this series. He actually started out quite well, living up there in Northern Finland – Lappland – in Snow Angels. He was happy with his wife then. And healthy. Then he moved to Helsinki, and in Lucifer’s Tears things got worse. He got involved with bosses trying to use him, and hardened gangsters, started drinking even more, and his health started to seriously decline. Then, in Helsinki White, things got seriously bad, and when we left him he was essentially a wreck with a relationship that pretty much seemed to be a goner. And as we meet him now, Vaara is stinking rich, but his life is completely miserable. The esteemed Inspector Vaara has had considerable professional success but paid a very high price.

Having been through a brain operation, Vaara is without emotions. He has been shot in his jaw and knee and has a hard time eating and walking. He is constantly in pain. He basically feeds and self-medicates on various combinations of vodka and pain killers. Kate is as out of it as he is, and now she complicates things by returning to the US. Even worse is that Vaara’s enemies seems to try to take advantage of his temporary weakness: He is being harassed and hurt, and friends are threatened and even killed. Vaara knows he is in a vulnerable position and that he and his friends are stretched dangerously thin, but to have a chance of saving himself and the people he loves and likes, he must mobilize what few resources he has, and push back as hard as he can. It is a risky game and the stakes are about as high as they can possibly get.

Helsinki Blood is a fascinating book. It is very well-written, with an intense and rich plot and lots of twist and turns, but first and foremost with a living breathing Inspector Vaara, spellbinding with his Weltsmertz and suffering. He is so human it hurts; even when he does the right thing – which is fairly rare – he often does it for the wrongest of reasons. And when he thinks he is helping the weak and saving humanity, he is really mostly engaged in helping himself and his friends. And the convoluted contradictions, delusions, savagery and general mess that is the story in Helsinki Blood is exactly why you ought to read this book.

Praise for Helsinki Blood:

“Inspector Kari Vaara’s latest nightmare barrels along at a breakneck pace as he faces enemies on his doorstep as well as his own demons within. James Thompson’s spare, no-frills action is straight to the point. Helsinki Blood as raw as it gets, it doesn’t pause for breath and it and takes no prisoners.”

Quentin Bates, author of Frozen Assets and Cold Comfort

Links to books by James Thompson at Amazon US and Amazon UK

I am delighted to see Night Rounds (original Swedish title Nattrond, first published in 1999) finally in English translation! At the same time, I have a hard time not mentioning how strongly I dislike that English and American publishers don’t publish foreign crime fiction series in sequence. This book is actually the second book in Helene Tursten’s highly acclaimed series about Detective Inspector Irene Huss, following the very good first novel – Detective Inspector Irene Huss.

Night Rounds: A Detective Inspector Irene Huss InvestigationSo now, in 2012, following the publication of the first, the third and the fifth books in the series, and after the TV-series about Irene Huss has been on public television here in the US, comes the second installment in the series. I guess I should simply say better late than never. But I think it is important for readers to actually know that this is a very old book – the publisher doesn’t say this and I have seen readers complaining about it on Amazon.

As some readers may remember, the Swedish detective Irene Huss is a former Ju-Jitsu champion and a mother of twin teenage girls. She is also wife of a successful chef. She works in the Violent Crimes Unit in Goteborg, Sweden – the second largest city in Sweden.

One night the power goes out at a local hospital, The Lowander Institute, a private hospital in Goteborg, Sweden. The back-up generator fails to kick in, and a patient in ICU dies. The nurse who was looking after the patient disappears. There is only one witness, and she claims to have seen Nurse Tekla doing her night rounds. Which could have been an excellent observation, except that nurse Tekla died – committed suicide – 60 years ago. She lived and breathed for the hospital, and she killed herself after being dismissed by the founding father, Dr. Sverker Löwander, the Surgical Chief of Medicine.

So there it is – Detective Inspector Huss has to figure out the why’s and the who’s of a murder and a disappearance basically without a clue, working a murder scene that some think is haunted, trying to figure if there is perhaps something in the real human relationships or events in the past that can somehow explain what is going on.

As more people die, it becomes clear that somebody is impersonating nurse Tekla Olsson. But who? There are several suspects? And why? What is the purpose? Why are people being killed this way? As the investigation moves forward, old and deeply hidden secrets emerge. Things don’t come easy in this investigation – it’s about following police procedure and finding small pieces of the truth, one bit at a time.

I like reading Helene Tursten. Detective Inspector Irene Huss is one of my favorite Swedish heroines, both in the books and in the TV series. The novels about her nicely balance stories of her family life and work issues involving the investigation. Overall, good character development is one of Tursten’s strong suits, and I have always liked stories where the key people feel alive, with emotions, who are living authentic and complex lives. Also, Tursten is good at creating interesting plots and Night Rounds is no exception. This is an entertaining, suspenseful and well-written Swedish crime fiction novel that will keep you guessing right up to the end. And it has a clever ending too. Night Rounds is a good, solid police procedural I am sure you will enjoy!

Praise for the Inspector Huss series:

“An absorbing, intelligent mystery that holds its own alongside the best feminine hardboiled novels.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR, “Fresh Air”

“These days Scandinavian crime writers are thick on the ground. It’s nice to see that the women can be just as bloodthirsty as the men.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A superior Scandinavian crime novel…. Tursten does an outstanding job of offering multiple plausible murders, making this the rare procedural that actually requires the reader to evaluate alibis, motives, and means to solve the case.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Links to books by Helene Tursten at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

Swedish crime fiction writer Mari Jungstedt keeps getting better and better. This is her fourth book translated into English, after Unseen, Unspoken and Unknown (A Killer’s Art is now also available in the US). The translation by Tiina Nunnally is excellent.

Mari Jungstedt’s books are all set on the scenic tourist island of Gotland in Sweden, and the all feature the sleuthing duo Inspector Anders Knutas and Swedish news reporter Johan Berg. They are all quite good, but to my mind this book is the best to date.

The action in A Killer’s Art starts with the murder of a very well-known local art-gallery owner, Egon Wallin. Egon was a prominent and visible man in the local community, and well respected locally as well as in the art world. And now he is found brutally murdered and hanging from the medieval town gate in the beautiful and quiet little town of Visby.

As Knutas and his colleagues start digging into the case dark secrets and unknown facts start to surface. The gallery owner, who has just opened a new, very interesting exhibition featuring a young Lithuanian artist, had sold his gallery without anyone knowing it, not even his wife. Both he and his wife secretly had lovers, each without the other knowing about it. Also, his wife, going through the house after her husband’s death, found a number of extremely valuable paintings hidden there. Further investigation showed that they had all been stolen from various Swedish owners over the last few years.

Then, while Knutas and his colleagues are still more or less completely in the dark, struggling to make sense of the case and not finding anything that seems to lead them in the direction of the killer, a new killing takes place. A man is reported missing from the local hotel and the police feel certain that he has been or will be killed. When he is finally found, his is lying half-naked on the snowy grave of the first victim, badly mutilated and seemingly tortured. Time is running out for the police.

We touch base, of course, with the private lives of both Knutas and Johan Berg as well. And especially with the somewhat complicated relationship between Berg and his beloved Emma, which at least for a while in this book seems to change for the better. However, that changes when their little daughter becomes a target and is kidnapped – Emma hurls his engagement ring across the room.

This is a very enjoyable book, excellently written, very clear and at times elegant. Also, it is a book that will perhaps be of particular interest to art lovers, as it moves in the world of art in Sweden, and features a number of interesting paintings and artists such as “The Dying Dandy” by the Swedish impressionist Nils Dardel along with several paintings by Zorn.

I loved this book. The main characters are well-drawn and well-known at this point in the series and seemed very alive to me. Some of the scenes and elements of the plot are wonderful, for instance a James Bond-like art theft in Stockholm that was brilliantly executed and very memorable. I read A Killer’s Art very fast, as I found it hard to put down. It is very suspenseful and intriguing, and I highly recommend it.

Links to books by Mari Jungstedt at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Killer’s Island (original title «Drömmen förde dej vilse») is the first book in Swedish crime fiction author Anna Jansson’s series featuring the female detective Maria Wern that has been translated into English. This is somewhat odd for a couple of reasons. The first is that Killer’s Island is the 11th book in this series, which makes it an unusual starting point. The second is that this series is already familiar to a relatively large number of lovers of crime fiction: The TV series featuring Maria Wern is well-known and is even distributed on DVD both in UK and US! So Anna Jansson is no ordinary debutant.

Perhaps Killer’s Island has been chosen as the first translation in the Maria Wern series because of its content? I don’t know the quality of the other books in the series, so I can’t really say – but I do know that Killer’s Island is a very solid, well-written thriller about a psychotic murderer on the island of Gotland. Anna Jansson weaves together old myths, modern technology and current reality into a frightening and at times almost appalling plot.

A boy is set upon by thugs and dies. A police officer trying to help the boy is brutally attacked herself. A nurse is beheaded. And more. Also, bodies are strangely, mystically arranged.
A nightmare is unfolding on the otherwise mostly idyllic island of Gotland.

The police force, including detective Maria Wern, has a very hard time understanding the motives underlying the violence and the choice of victims. Even worse is that the killer seems almost omnipotent: he sees everybody, he knows everything, he even has access to the inner secrets of the police investigation.

Killer’s Island is well-written and excellently composed. We learn a lot about the main characters, we are acquainted with each of the victims: the book has vividly drawn, quite interesting characters. The descriptions are great as well. Also, Jansson is very good at understanding and describing the psychological consequences of the horrific violence inflicted by the killer.

Killer’s Island is a suspenseful, very compelling and entertaining crime fiction novel by an author I hope we will see more from in English.

Links to books by Tove Jansson at Amazon US and Amazon UK.
Links to the Maria Wern movies at Wern at Amazon US and Maria Wern at Amazon UK.

The Human Part (Finnish original title Ihmisen osa) is a marvelous and fascinating tale by prize-winning Finnish author Kari Hotakainen. It starts, interestingly, with a scolding of authors. Authors are people who make a living by producing lies, says Salme Malmikunnas, the main protagonist in this wonderful novel.

But even so, Salme has a story to tell, and when she meets a living, breathing author at a book fair, she decides – after some persuasion – to sell her story for a few thousand Euro. She likes that he promises to tell her story exactly as she tells it, word by word.

But while Salme Malmikunnas is a lady of the past, where a word was a word, the author is an author. One of those who makes a living by telling tales and perhaps even spreading lies. He is willing to promise anything to get ahold of Salme’s story. He even tells her that he is willing to write the whole story in italics! But then – he tells lies when he writes, so why would he be truthful when he speaks to Salme and makes promises to her?

Finnish author Kari Hotakainen got his breakthrough as an author when he was nominated for the 1997 Finlandia Prize for Klassikko (The Classic). Later, in 2002, he was awarded this prize for Juoksuhaudantie (Battle Trench Avenue). And in 2004, Hotakainen received the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize for the same book. He has also received several other prizes internationally. He has written 10 novels, several collections of poetry, as well as plays and a TV-series. In 2010 he won the Runeberg Prize for The Human Part.

Kari Hotakainen – here as the author writing about the old lady and the author – spins an outstanding tale. And who knows where the truth ends and the lies begin in Salme’s tale as at is being retold by the author? All we know is that it is a grand tale, one that grows and grows and gets fatter and fatter. The Human Part a is tale of the destinies of Salme’s three children, of the new times in Finland, of the emptiness and falsehood of the values that some people hold.

Kari Hotakainen is a story teller “extraordinaire”. Quite out of the ordinary. Reading him makes me partly think of Arto Paasilinna, who has the same ability to spin a tale and the same dry, wicked sense of humor. The serious social sarcasm in Hotakainen also reminds me of Henrik Ibsen, who had the same special talent or ability to present social criticism and raise huge and important questions in an enlightening as well as entertaining fashion. I loved this book – especially the monologue by the bus driver Biko at the end of the book. Overall, The Human Part balances seriousness and humor using multiple voices in a very intriguing and highly entertaining way.

Links to books by Kari Hotakainen at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Münster’s Case (aka The Unlucky Lottery) is the sixth book in Swedish crime fiction writer Håkan Nesser’s excellent series about the grumpy, eccentric and brilliant Chief Inspector Van Veeteren. In this very intelligent mystery, Nesser has chosen to sideline Van Veeteren a little.

The book-loving and somewhat philosophical Chief Inspector is on sabbatical, and works in a second hand book store. Van Veeteren still views himself as a detective who can solve any case assigned him – as possibly the greatest detective ever. But he feels that he has seen too much evil and brutality – he simple cannot face it every day of his life anymore.
So when Waldemar Leverkuhn is stabbed to death, the case is assigned instead to his patient and persistent, but not quite as smart assistant, Inspector Münster. This is why in the US the book is entiteled Münster’s Case.

The backdrop for the murder is that four elderly friends have won a fairly large sum of money in the Dutch lottery (thus the UK title The Lucky Lottery), and gone out to celebrate their luck with a little something to eat and a lot to drink. Then, just a few hours later, at 2 am, one of them – Waldemar Leverkuhn – is found in his home, brutally murdered. He has been stabbed to death; actually he has been stabbed 28 times. Soon another of the lucky winners disappears too.

The investigators think perhaps one of the two survivors has decided to kill two of the other winners in other to increase the size of each share of the winning pot. But they fail to make any noticeable progress in the case. And even though this is Münster’s case and his chance to prove himself, he realizes that he has to go and ask Van Veeteren for help.

Van Veeteren listens to the story, and promises to ponder it. Which he does. And as often is the case, he sees something that has been overlooked – an element that may point in an entirely different direction. And soon Münster finds himself digging deeper and deeper into the personal history of Waldemar Leverkuhn, where he discovers dark secrets that complicate the case and endanger his very life.

Håkan Nesser is a wonderful writer, and while Münster’s Case (aka The Unlucky Lottery) is perhaps not the best book in the outstanding and very special series about the intriguing and elusive Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, it is still a great and very entertaining crime fiction novel. The plot is very good, smart and with some very nice twists and turns. But most of all, it is the fabulous storytelling and the understated humor that makes this book stand out from the crowd. This simply is great crime fiction.

Other reviews of Münster’s Case (The Unlucky Lottery):

‘an intriguing plot that keeps twisting right to the very end…The Unlucky Lottery sees Nesser paint a colourful picture of police life and a gripping story of revenge served very cold indeed’ –Edinburgh Evening News

‘Nesser is one of the best of the Nordic Noir writers, unafraid of moral ambiguity and excellent at building a brooding atmosphere’
–The Guardian

`Nesser’s typically quirky The Unlucky Lottery demonstrated that the author’s idiosyncratic skills were still firmly in place.’
–The Independent

See also the reviews at Eurocrime and Dancing with Skeletons.

Links to books by Hakan Nesser at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN

Finnish crime fiction writer Seppo Sakari Jokinen (b 1949) wrote the first book in his series featuring detective Sakari Koskinen in 1996. The book sold well, and since then Jokinen has written 16 more books featuring this interesting hero. While the series sells very well in Finland, Wolves and Angels is the first of Jokinen’s books to be translated into English.

Like Jokinen himself, Detective Lieutenant Sakari Koskinen lives in the beautiful city of Tampere, the third largest city in Finland, located about 2 hours driving north of Helsinki. In Wolves and Angels (original title Hukan enkelit), we meet a divorced detective Koskinen and his son Antti. Being recently divorced, but without any new relationship, Koskinen has turned his attention to exercising; and he displays considerable “sisu” (this Finnish term refers to strength of will, determination and perseverance) as he pursues bicycling and jogging and generally tries to whip himself into better shape. As it turns out, he has much more success with this than he has with dating.

Professionally, Sakari Koskinen has his work cut out for him in Wolves and Angels. The lifeless body of a disabled man has been found. The man has been murdered. And soon the police learn that he is member of a small gang known as the “Fallen Angels,” an odd group of wheelchair-bound motorcycle enthusiasts that live together in a community health center for disabled people. As other of the inhabitants of the center are attacked, fear starts to spread among patients and nurses. Who is attacking them? Who is it that kills weak, disabled and wheel-chair bound people? What is behind these despicable acts? Is there a serial killer on the loose playing angel of mercy?

Wolves and Angels, which won the prize for Best Finnish Crime Novel in 2002, is an intriguing, well-told story about the struggles of the disabled coping with emotions and bitterness, and the difficult situation of the underpaid people who care for them. Seppo Jokinen writes in a very nuanced way, with excellent depictions of interpersonal relationships and personal challenges, which make his characters come alive in the story.

Detective Lieutenant Sakari Koskinen is an interesting character – a thoughtful, considerate and smart detective, very devoted to his work, but at times a little quick-tempered – that I already am looking forward to reading more about. The plot in Wolves and Angels is very good, and I liked the writing style as well. I am very happy that more Finnish crime fiction is becoming available in English, and found Wolves and Angels to be a very valuable addition to this growing literature!

Links to books by Seppo Sakari Jokinen at Amazon US and Amazon UK.