IN THE SHADOW OF POWER and IN THE NAME OF TRUTH, books 7 & 8 in the Sandhamn Murders series

IN THE SHADOW OF POWER (Sandhamn Murders #7)
VIVECA STEN (tr. Marlaine Delargy)
AmazonCrossing
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: What do the new arrivals on Sandhamn Island have to fear? Their own secrets—in this gripping novel of suspense by the bestselling author of In the Heat of the Moment.

The new summer house on Sandhamn Island is an architectural dream for its owner, Carsten Jonsson. It’s a nightmare for the locals. The venture capitalist has flouted local traditions, property lines, and the natural beauty of the coastline. He’s also too wealthy and arrogant to heed the anonymous warnings to leave.

The threats escalate when his guest lodge is burned to the ground and an unidentifiable corpse is found in the charred ruins. Detective Inspector Thomas Andreasson isn’t sure if it’s murder or a tragic accident. Until his friend attorney Nora Linde is drawn into the investigation.

Nora’s emotional investment in Carsten’s fragile and fearful wife, Celia, is yielding a new level of that the Jonssons are hiding more than anyone can imagine. Now Thomas and Nora must sift through the ashes of a puzzling crime and step into the shadows of a powerful family, whose deadly secrets are coming to light on Sandhamn.

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

My Review: This entry in the series is a major shake-up of the Seriesverse. Everything I say now forward is a HUGE SPOILER. You've been warned.

Nora, previously a bank-lawyer, has switched gears and become a public prosecutor in the Economic Crimes investigations unit. This makes a lot of sense as the stories need to include her more organically. Thomas being a police inspector will, quite naturally, need to interact with her more often and on less flimsy pretexts. Given the scumminess of her boss's behavior towards her in the last book, it's a good thing she's left that bank...and even better that she's left banking.

Jonas is, four years after the last book's events, her partner and the father of her first daughter. Take that, Henrik! Of course this means she's got Wilma, Jonas's daughter the teenager, to contend with, though that's a treat for another book as she's entirely absent from this one. As her own two sons with Henrik (in this book, they're vacationing with him) enter their teens...poor lamb, she's really walked into a buzzsaw with this...she's going to face some troubles! Heaven only knows the blended-family issues this presents are fertile, if well-trodden, fictional grounds. They call these tropes "evergreens" for a reason.

On the Thomas end, the Scoobygroup's changed. Margit's been promoted and is no longer his loyal sidekick. Aram, whose foolishness in the last book earned my snorts and eyerolls, is now in Margit's spot. His Iranian ancestry sould let Author Sten do some serious soul-searching about Swedishness. Erik, another Scoobygroup character that I myownself never found interesting, has gone into the private sector and is tempting Thomas to follow him with better pay and easier working conditions. Will Thomas leave the police just as Nora joins them? Stay tuned...not in this book, though.

THIS story, the mystery we're here to watch unfold, is about Carsten Jonsson, a bigfootin' vulture capitalist whose finances are teetering, also with no taste and no class, violating Sandhamn's cultural norms. He builds his family a gigantic McMansion that's aesthetically out of place (shades of book one!) and might be legally questionable regarding property rights...but there's a suspicious fire as he invites the whole island over to "welcome" him and his family...and, of course, there's a dead body in the mix. Thomas must investigate, since it's a murder not an arson case. Nora is involved because a) prosecutor who used to work in banking, 2) longtime Sandhamner thus included in the party invitation, iii) woman whose spidey-senses have gone off at the ménage chez Jonsson because wife-component's behavior is making her very, very edgy. Was the Sandhamn neighbor who's made it his mission to oust Jonsson and family from the neighborhood guilty of setting the fire? Was the dead body killed in the fire, or dead before it? And who, exactly, was it who died?

Nora's change of career makes her involvement in the case so much more logical. It's also good that so much hinges on her banking background, where she was driven off by the shadiness of the banking business's deals with criminals. Here's a victim whose involvement in that shady, not-quite-illegal but clearly immoral world of Russian big money has led to consequences.

Things are resolved, of course, and ugly secrets kept by both the Jonssons are aired. Sandhamn's pretty surface is again revealed to be draped over the usual human ugliness. Thomas does something stupid again, but it made more sense to me this time. Or I'm just getting inured to it....

The themes of environmental change and related business turpitude are, as expected, much to my taste. I've really only got one really big "do what now" moment in this read: WHO THE HELL IS EVA?!

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REVIEW OF BOOKS 1 & 2 HERE
REVIEW OF BOOKS 3 & 4 HERE
REVIEW OF BOOKS 5 & 6 HERE
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IN THE NAME OF TRUTH (Sandhamn Murders #8)
VIVECA STEN (tr. Marlaine Delargy)
AmazonCrossing
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A shocking abduction rocks idyllic Sandhamn Island in an enthralling novel of suspense by Viveca Sten, bestselling author of In the Heat of the Moment.

With the summer season on Sandhamn comes an unsettling mystery for Detective Inspector Thomas Andreasson. A bullied young boy has vanished from a sailing camp on neighboring Lökholmen Island. Has the terrorized eleven-year-old run away? Or, in this isolated vacation spot where strangers lurk, is it something more ominous?

The disappearance has also captured the interest of Thomas’s longtime friend, attorney Nora Linde. The missing child happens to be the son of her latest client, Christian Dufva. He is a key witness against his partner in a high-profile embezzlement trial, and Dufva’s testimony could be devastating. It’ll also be Nora’s biggest win—the next step toward a position as chief prosecutor. But with every anonymous threat against Dufva, the stakes get higher.

When new evidence surfaces in their respective cases, new questions and fears arise for Thomas and Nora. Time is running out to resolve them. So is hope of finding the boy alive. Because on Sandhamn Island, the truth is buried as deep as the secrets.

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

My Review: Continuing our exploration of "what was that again?" moments in this series, we have stalking, bullying, pedophilia, one runaway kid and a missing one, embezzlement, gambling, gangsters from Lithuania, relationship woes, and a wedding.

Wedding?

Jonas and Nora are getting hitched! Why, I am unsure, since their daughter Julia's school age now. And Jonas's fitness isn't, IMO, really top-notch, since he accepts a job flying to Thailand on the eve of the ceremony. Yet Nora seems not to see this as the red flag I do...though of course she's not exactly thrilled with his swanning off at that moment. Her angry repsonse felt muted and disproportionately absent the larger sense of questioning I expected. Only he could take this job? He couldn't buy a ticket on another airline to get home on time? ...???... Probably the biggest surprise to me, apart from the fact that it's happening at all, is Wilma's inclusion in the ceremony. Clearly skipping over her adolescence has let us have the nice-person end product without the factually inevitable angst.

Thomas, meanwhile, is discovering what I've thought all along: Elin's wonderful but Pernilla's a pill and rejoining his life to hers was a major goof-up. After succumbing to Erik's blandishments to leave the police, Thomas found out this didn't make Pernilla one bit less awful. Now he's back to his meaningful if lower-paying job (to Pernilla's disgust), repartnered with Aram, and his energies are focused on the summer-camp issues. As readers with any experience of series mysteries already know, there's a connection between Nora's court case over embezzlement and her star witness's son Benjamin's disappearance from said camp; what it is turned out to be a surprise to me. My original theory about what the thread was turned out to be wrong. That actually made me enjoy the read more because being surprised eight books into a series is a good thing.

The usual problem I have with these books is that Thomas or someone else police-y does something deeply stupid that risks his life...no this time so much, instead there are decisions made in investigating the camp-problems that seem particularly lunkheaded...there's a search for the missing boy that's badly mishandled...but nothing that's going to get Thomas killed. The anonymous threatening calls made to the witness and to Nora are overdetailed. Knowing they're happening is enough and there's only so many ways to threaten someone without becoming repetitive, which they do.

Possibly the biggest disappointment to me was the fact that, in pursuit of their respective crimes, Thomas and Nora really don't interact much. It makes sense given the nature of the events, but I found that I missed them spending friend-time together.

The sailing camp that Benjamin's been coerced into attending by his father is nightmarish reading, with some Lord of the Flies-level bullying that's not downplayed and a camp counselor whose mental-health struggles mislead and complicate the police investigation into Benjamin's disappearance. There's a great deal of information about sailing and its culture in Sweden that was interesting enough but might slow things down a bit for thriller readers. The local pedophile gets a look-in, of course he would since he's been put in the book, in what ends up as a truly unnecessary red herring. Oops, that's a spoiler. Well, that's life boys and girls, when reviewing book eight of a series there will be some. I expect longtime readers of the series are going to be a bit testy about the complete absence of a murder in this installment. I myownself think the evolution that's underway could be great...depending on what Author Sten does with it.

A long read with short chapters that stay on point is a good thing for most modern readers. I doubt most will see what's coming at the end. If you do see it...kudos. But don't talk about it!