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.

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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.

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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!

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

Sandhamn Murders series 7 & 8