IN THE HEAT OF THE MOMENT and IN HARM'S WAY, books 5 & 6 of the Sandhamn Murders

IN THE HEAT OF THE MOMENT(Sandhamn Murders #5)
VIVECA STEN (tr. Marlaine Delargy)
AmazonCrossing
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: What’s a lie among friends? It’s murder—in this riveting thriller by Viveca Sten, bestselling author of Tonight You’re Dead…

It’s Midsummer’s Eve, the celebration of the longest day of the year, and on Sandhamn it’s the longest party of the year. But the fun comes to a dead halt when a young reveler is murdered, a teenage girl is found drugged and dazed on the beach, and other young women vanish. So far, what links the victims is a mystery. For Nora Linde and her new boyfriend, Jonas Sköld, the crimes are personal: one of the missing girls is Wilma, Jonas’s daughter. And her disappearance could test Nora and Jonas’s relationship in ways they never expected.

Thrust into the investigation, they soon discover that it’s more than a case of bad blood between friends. But the truth, which has receded into a haze of carousing, drugs, and liquor, is getting harder to see. If Nora and Jonas are going to find out what happened to Wilma, they’d better do it fast—before the ebbing tides sweep away all the terrible secrets of that night on Sandhamn Island.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Another more Thomas-centered book, therefore more police procedural-like than the cozy-er Nora-centric ones...but only slightly. Thomas and Pernilla have a new daughter, and experience the stresses of parenthood all over again (remembering this is their second child together, and their long separation came after the first child's death). Thomas is the lead investigator on the murder-and-disappearance case that involves Nora's new boyfriend through his daughter being among the girls who've vanished from the high-octane Midsummer's Night revelries. Given that he was really not happy about saying yes to her badgering pleas to be allowed to party with the cool kids, he's an absolute wreck.

Wilma, Nora's boyfriend's daughter, is part of a crowd that Nora finds troubling. They're privileged, spoiled brats who use lovely Sandhamn and its close-knit community as a backdrop for irresponsible chemical-fueled partying. Nora's ex-husband and his milieu of privilege come forcefully to mind as she tries to assist Thomas in his attempts to bring a young man's murderer to justice and return the missing young women to their insanely anxious families. Her worries for her own young sons and their futures enter into the story as well. The awful ex is, unsurprisingly given that he's in the social milieu of the dead boy's parents, sticking his oar in. It seems life sans Nora isn't the fun that life with her was. She, unlike Thomas vis-a-vis Pernilla, isn't having it. This gets all the yay from me after his abusive behavior in an earlier book.

The main thread of the story, though, is Thomas and policing partner Margit methodically working to solve the case without significant details. These are all locked in the heads of the spoiled, drunk, high kids whose reactions to a dead guy and some missing gal-pals is basically to whine about being asked questions by old farts in uniforms instead of being allowed to get away from all this boring shit on Papa's yacht.

Ick ptui.

Thomas, in spite of needing to be focused on the case, is of course just as eager as the brats are to get the whole thing over with so he can go home and play with his new daughter. (I'm still deeply conflicted about this rapprochement with Pernilla, whose presentation of self makes me suspicious.) So the detective, his sidekick, and the witnesses are all conflicted and not clearly focused on the tragedy that's occurred. That presents a problem for me as a reader.

The dead boy's father, the young hellions doing the partying, and to an extent Nora's stepdaughter-adjacent person Wilma, are all really unsympathetic characters. Their collective story is woven of multiple strands of neglect and indifference coupled with overaffluence and its deleterious effect on the moral compasses of the privileged. Where this led me as a reader was into a lot of "Thomas should be home with his new baby and Margit ought to slap all of 'em" eyerolling. The author seems in a funny way to share my impatience because the end of the book feels like a rush to wrap up the threads, so isn't all that satisfying. I can assure my ma'at-lovin' readers that there's resolution to the death and the disappearances too. There will be no black armbands in the Linde ménage. I'm hopeful that Jonas, with Nora, won't repeat his mistakes and Nora will continue to shun her vile ex-husband.

This book is very much not my favorite in the series to date, and skated perilously close to becoming a DNF on several occasions. The power of Thomas and Nora as people I believe could exist and whose flaws I can invest in as I watch them overcoming, or trying to, their effects powered my drive through the read.

YMMV, of course.

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REVIEW OF BOOKS 1 & 2 HERE
REVIEW OF BOOKS 3 & 4 HERE REVIEW OF BOOKS 7 & 8 HERE
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IN HARM'S WAY (Sandhamn Murders #6)
VIVECA STEN (tr. Marlaine Delargy)
AmazonCrossing
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: A woman’s dangerous career comes to a chilling end in this spellbinding thriller by Viveca Sten, bestselling author of In the Heat of the Moment…

The body of world-famous journalist Jeanette Thiels is discovered the day after Christmas, frozen in a snow-spotted garden just steps from her hotel on Sandhamn Island. Detective Thomas Andreasson finds it highly unlikely that it was some bizarre accident. After all, the relentless war-zone correspondent was no stranger to conflict and controversy—both professional, and of late, very personal. Who would want to see her dead is another story.

Enlisting the help of attorney Nora Linde, his longtime friend on holiday, Thomas is anxious for the answers. But he and Nora don’t have to look far. The clues are leading them closer to home than they imagined. Jeannette may have made a career out of exposing corruption at the highest levels of world power, but she was also a woman with secrets of her own and they’re coming to light on Sandhamn. But for Thomas and Nora, unearthing the deeply rooted deceptions behind Jeanette’s death could now put those closest to her in harm’s way, too.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I now know more than I ever knew there was to know about pickled herring.

This is not an approving statement.

Again, we're police-proceduraling with Thomas and Margit. She's coalesced into more of a presence than I ever expected her to do, has our Margit; but I'm still not distracted from the mains by her involvement in investigations so I call the author's level of detail in limning her character good. The immigration issues facing Europe, the backlash from "cultural purity" proponents, the unbelievable, incredible hatred that some are consumed by for those not just like them all concatenate at the same time as Nora's Yule festivities on Sandhamn. (Why she includes the vile ex-husband is beyond me.)

After Iranian immigrant journalist Juliette dies in the snow outside her hotel on the island (you know, I love cozies and their settings, but the logical part of me says "the Swedes ain't idiots and this place would glow like Chernobyl on any statistical map of Swedish crime" like Midsomer would in England); it's not a horrible accident, of course. Juliette's work is digging into some unnerving and clearly unsavory stuff that the Powers That Be did not want exposed. Then Juliette's controlling Swedish ex-husband comes into the suspect frame; even his pre-adolescent daughter thinks he probably had some hand in her mother's death.

Enter Thomas and Margit as the lead investigators, and the police Scoobygroup we've seen before starts the interesting ferreting among the fallen leaves of this dogged, but hapless, woman's life. The work she'd been doing about the burgeoning nativist group that hates non-Nordic Swedes was reaching a critical mass and that's a reason to kill in that sick, twisted worldview. The issues between her and her ex keep the focus on the police's work in solving her poisoning; thus off the Nora parts of the plot. For those hooked in by Nora from the off, this story will feel frustrating. Her involvement in Thomas's case is pretty much nil; her plot strands are lawyering related, as her company is enmeshed in the colonial remnants of Sweden's centuries-old Baltic empire. This leads to some unpleasant, though legal, ways of making money, to Nora's deep disgust; her firm's head and she are due for a showdown over this shady, unethical entanglement (among other things, like misogyny and borderline harassment). As this echoes the main case's focus on the role of History in forming a place for better or ill, it wasn't a waste to include Nora. She doesn't play a role in the crime investigation but her moral musings and decisions do offer depth of field to the main idea behind the murder.

I am not a fan of the dithering "will-she-won't-she" style of storytelling I see all too much of in series reads. Why women should be presented as so weak as to constantly question their decisions about men is something I do not think we question as a trope nearly hard enough. Nora's ex shouldn't be up for rehabilitation after his emotional abuse of her. (Let's not even bring up The Slap. Might bring up my lunch wth it.) She's decided several books ago that the affair she discovered him having is the bridge too far. That should be allowed to be that. Her efforts not to estrange her ex-husband from their sons is admirable. But let's leave it as focused on the EX part and not so much the HUSBAND part.

That ongoing snark aside, the role of ethnicity in this story is very much the catalyst for some trademark idiotic behaviors among the investigators. Thomas in particular is, every book, doing something that unnecessarily endangers his life...and while I'm really not on board with his reunion with Pernilla, he DOES have an infant daughter to consider before haring off without backup to Get The Perp. And this time he's very much not alone, since one of the investigative Scoobygroup is an Iranian-born Swede whose dander gets up as facts of the case come to light. He decides, like his colleagues Thomas and Margit, to say "screw it" to rule-following and puts himself (and, one would think, any hope of bringing a successful prosecution) in danger.

Well, fiction ain't fact, and at least in the latter case I really got why the response was what it was.

I do want to offer one very major content warning: There is, in this entry, animal abuse that I found very upsetting. It is the reason that I rated this read lower than the one before it, when before this occurred, I was set to give it a solid four stars. I am, it's true, very averse to this subject matter, and others might not find the event portrayed as upsetting as I did. For my fellows in feeling that children and animals being harmed are not welcome events in my entertainment, be aware this occurs.

Snowy, Yule-y streets in the sweetly intimate island community of Sandhamn. The expected death. The inevitable successful resolution of the crime. The ongoing lives of characters I've come to care about. All the elements of damned fine read. And so it was.

Until the content warning stuff happened. I'll be continuing with the series but some luster got lost off my pleasure.