GUILTLESS and TONIGHT YOU'RE DEAD, books 3 & 4 of the Sandhamn Murders

GUILTLESS (Sandhamn Murders #3)
VIVECA STEN (tr. Marlaine Delargy)
AmazonCrossing
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The tiny Swedish island of Sandhamn has always been a haven for lawyer Nora Linde. With trouble brewing in her marriage, she finds its comforts more welcome than ever, even in the depths of winter. That is, until her two young sons trip across a severed arm in the woods.

The boys’ gruesome discovery will once again connect Nora with her childhood friend Thomas Andreasson, now a local police detective. When the limb is identified as belonging to a twenty-year-old woman who disappeared without a trace months earlier, what had been a missing persons case takes on a whole new urgency.

Nora and Thomas delve deeply into the woman’s final hours, each of them wrestling not only with the case but with the private demons it awakens in them. As they do, they’ll find themselves drawn into the history of Sandhamn and the tensions that have been simmering just below the surface for more than a hundred years.

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My Review: ScandiCozy all over again...the novel, which is to say the ongoing series part of the read, is about the familial misadventures and vicissitudes of the main characters. This part of the read worked very well for me. Thomas's life as a cop is complicated enough to scare off an understanding and caring partner, let alone a self-centered one like Thomas's ex-wife. Nora the lawyer's finally bumped into the immutable reality that her snobbish doctor husband is a complete waste of her time and emotion when his ongoing infidelity is revealed (to no one's shock except Nora's). Now she needs to find a way to co-parent with someone she quite rightly despises after learning of his betrayal of her.

Thomas is at a different crossroads. His future is as unclear as his friend Nora's is, but he needs to reckon with a past that he's mostly dealt with by running from what he can't bury. His pain, that of a grieving father for his dead child, is so deep he can't let go of it. His ex-wife, Pernilla, who gets his blame for the death, is by the end of the book less shibboleth and more a flawed and also grieving person. Maybe, now that he's got some perspective, he can let go of his raw pain and move forward...we shall see. And that, right there, is the genius of this series: I care, and I want to see. I'm really invested in the characters.

The murder of a young girl, and its ties to Sandhamn's past, wasn't as successful for me. In part this is down to the fact that, while I am perfectly happy to suspend disbelief, the interrelationship of the modern crime with Nora's house and, by extension, her already troubled idea of her long-ago found family, strained the relevant emotional muscles too far. That, plus a fair-play violation in the form of a crucial interrelationship of past and present being completely withheld, left me feeling less kindly toward that aspect of the read.

I am also really discomfited by Nora's too-easy acceptance of some very shady "explanations" of a new character's deeply creeper-y behaviors. It could simply be the author felt they were sufficient...this all takes place pre-#MeToo...but they read as troubling to me because Nora doesn't seem to question the man's motives more than superficially. It's kind-of of a piece with the spoilery problem I had with book 2. This ain't, to my old-man eyes, any kind of a message I think should sit well with anyone in the 2020s.

Don't start here, but don't skip the story in its turn. It might not be my favorite of them so far, but it's got a lot going for it.

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REVIEW OF BOOKS 1 & 2 HERE
REVIEW OF BOOKS 5 & 6 HERE
REVIEW OF BOOKS 7 & 8 HERE
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TONIGHT YOU'RE DEAD (Sandhamn Murders #4)
VIVECA STEN (tr. Marlaine Delargy)
AmazonCrossing
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Soon to be divorced, attorney Nora Linde is finding her way as a single mother, and even falling in love again, when she’s asked by her childhood friend Detective Thomas Andreasson to help in a disturbing investigation. Marcus Nielsen, a university student, has apparently committed suicide, but it’s what he’s left behind that’s so suspicious and damning: his research into the Coastal Rangers, an elite military group where, in 1976, a young cadet died under questionable circumstances, a sadistic sergeant went free, and a case went cold.

When two of Nielsen’s contacts are also found dead—and diaries of their torturous training turn up missing—Thomas and Nora are certain that whatever happened three decades ago is unforgivable. And for someone who wants to keep those secrets buried—unforgettable. Now they must fight against time to expose a cover-up that hasn’t yet claimed its last victim.

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My Review: Much more Thomas-centered than the previous book. The crime here, in the present day, is deceptively simple...a suicide by hanging that a grieving mother cannot bring herself to imagine is what it seems.

Surprise! It isn't what it seems.

Nora's main involvement is to be asked by Thomas to look into the some aspects of the modern case as there's a personal connection to her. As her divorce approaches finalization, she's still playing nice with the family she's almost escaped from when her son's got a birthday party coming up. On the plus side she's got someone new in her life (who's actually also her tenant). The main item that contains what we all need to know about this tragedy's historical roots is, again, a found diary with deeply relevant clues. This repetitive trope would normally be grounds for a whole-star deduction in my rating schema. The reason it isn't? The sociology of military service subplot grabbed me hard. Not incidentally, in this entry Thomas and his partner Margit come more together as a detecting team for me, relying more on each other than in the last book. I'm not all the way sure why it happened now, but their previously slightly tenuous working relationship became more solidly grounded in pursuing the sadistic, evil killer.

Thomas's last-book accidental dousing, to undersell its seriousness, and subsequent loss of toes, his stint in rehab after the accident, and his reunion with self-centered Pernilla-the-ex, all make this entry in the series much more in his focus than last time. I'm still in the camp of thinking these are more Scandicozy than Nordic Noir stories, though the awful, sadistic murderer...serial killer, actually...is matched for ferocity by the "unexpected" addition of another guilty party. I won't at all say the existence or identity of the second party was surprising. It was believable, inasmuch as any mystery story's believable.

What beggared my belief was Thomas, near the end of the book (though not the story, see below), doing something that NO rational person would do who had all the information he possessed. It was stupid of him to risk so much for no commensurate possibility of gain. As it turned out, the result of his risk-taking was...tidy...but only for now, or I miss my guess. (In other words, I don't really believe it is what I read on these pages.)

The end of the book isn't an ending so much as a stopping place. There's obviously a lot more to the life-stories I'm invested in; but I am also reasonably sure there's more of the entanglements that came to light in this book to come in future entries. They're just too temptingly dangling loose for those strands not to lead somewhere new.

Again, don't start here but don't skip this one...Thomas and Pernilla have a BIG surprise for us that you won't want to miss out on.