β Scribed by Ake Edwardson; Laurie Thompson
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
From the land of the midnight sun, a compelling and dark thriller by Sweden?s master of crime fiction:
The autumn gloom comes quickly on the Swedish city of Gothenburg, and for Detective Chief Inspector Erik Winter the days seem even shorter, the nights bleaker, when he is faced with two apparently unrelated sets of perplexing crimes. Mysterious assaults on college students in Gothenburg?s parks are carried out in the dark of the night, while during the day toddlers are abducted from their nursery schools and quickly returned, seemingly unharmed, before anyone even notices they are missing.
Investigating these bizarre cases, D.C.I. Winter and his team follow their scant leads to ?the flats,? the barren prairies of rural Sweden, whose wastelands conceal crimes as sinister as the land itself. Winter must deduce the labyrinthine connections between the cases before the culprit?or is it culprits??closes in on his own family.
Haunting and psychologically astute, Frozen Tracks is another triumph from the award- winning master of Swedish noir.
The reader stays perpetually ahead of the irritatingly slow detectives in Swedish crime writer Edwardson's third Erik Winter police procedural to be translated into English (after 2006's Never End). DCI Erik Winter and his team are baffled by a rash of beatings in Gothenburg that have nearly killed several young men, who are linked only by the distinctive mark left by the attacker's mysterious weapon. Meanwhile, nursery school children begin to report being lured to the car of a strange mister, who gives them candy. The police brush off these incidents until one boy is found badly beaten in the woods. Soon Winter is thrown into a race to save a kidnapped boy from the clutches of a monster. Readers will connect the dots faster than Winter, whose investigation is jarringly interrupted by scenes from the abductor's point-of-view. The denouement leaves too many loose ends, making for an uninspired take on the tired topic of child abductions. (Aug.)
Copyright Β© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Christmas is fast approaching, but life is anything but festive for Detective Chief Inspector Erik Winter. Days of dwindling daylight find the Swedish detective haunted by two puzzlingβand seemingly unconnectedβsets of crimes. Several university students have been viciously attacked at various points around the city. At the same time, children are being abducted from metropolitan nurseries, a situation that hits much too close to home for Winter, who dotes on the young daughter he shares with longtime live-in lover Angela. Leads followed by Winter and his colleagues take them to the parched prairies of rural Sweden, whose inhabitants are every bit as bleak and desperate as the landscape. Something sinister has happened out here, Winter tells his partner. He can feel it in his bones. Though his police procedurals lack the suspense of fellow Swede Asa Larsson's, Edwardson (Sun and Shadow, 2005) creates endlessly interesting characters, in particular Winter, who tackles crime after crime with a shrewd mind and a heavy heart. Recommend this one to readers of Henning Mankell. Block, Allison
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
It's autumn in Gothenburg and an anxious mother calls the police: her little boy was lured into a car by a man offering sweets. The child is returned unharmed but then the same thing happens with a little girl, and then another. Each child attends a different nursery, and each parent contacts a diff
Since Postmortem garnered critical acclaim and a record-breaking five awards for a first crime novel, the Scarpetta novels have often been imitated, but never bettered. Against her own judgement and the advice of Benton Wesley and her niece, Lucy, Scarpetta agrees to return to Virginia as a consulta
What does it take to bring the entire Island of Sodor Railway System to a halt? Just a crack in the track. Well, a crack in the track and some hail on rail . . . and a toad in the road, and a fuss on the bus. In fact, one thing leads to another until just about everything that can go wrong does go w
***The Fast and the Furious* gets a futuristic twist in this action-packed debut!** On corporately controlled Castra, rally racing is a high-stakes game that seventeen-year-old Phoebe Van Zant knows all too well. Phee's legendary racer father disappeared mysteriously, but that hasn't stopped