A Nearly Normal Family is a gripping legal thriller that forces the reader to consider: How far would you go to protect the ones you love? In this twisted narrative of love and murder, a horrific crime makes a seemingly normal family question everything they thought they knew about their life—and each other. What I…
Would you kill for the one you love? That's the question that international bestseller Stefan Ahnhem's The Ninth Grave: A Fabian Risk Novel seeks to answer in this spine-tingling thriller set six months before the events in Victim Without a Face (available December 5, 2017). On a cold winter evening, the Swedish minister of justice…
Brrr. It’s getting cold out there! With all the snow hitting the east coast, we started to think about all the winter mysteries out there. There’s something extra sinister about a setting that’s dark, cold, and quiet that makes for a perfect murder mystery. And there are plenty of snow-covered countries where our favorites take…
If you like the setting of your murder mysteries to take place in a cold, snowy climate, you’re not alone. The newest and bloodiest murder mysteries now seem to take place in Scandinavia. There’s something about murder, mystery, and the bitter cold that seem to go together, and it seems that readers have been entertained…
As with many other crime novels, my books are a mirror of the world and the society I live in. Swedish crime fiction often explores very dark themes and is greatly concerned with social issues and the problems of living here. Readers obviously feel a fascination with what we might call “Nordic melancholy,” concocted from…
Early morning. Håkan von Enke (Terrence Hardiman) begins his day as he always does, winding the Mora clock in the front hall of his beautiful historic home. Taking the same walk. Thinking the same thoughts. Just as he described to Kurt Wallander in Episode 2: “A Lesson in Love.” Only this time, von Enke doesn’t…
The final series of Wallander on Masterpiece Mystery has an uncharacteristic start. For one thing, our Swedish detective friend Kurt Wallander (Kenneth Branagh) is in South Africa for some sort of international police conference. More uncharacteristic than that, Wallander is soaking in the sunshine, jogging, inhaling…smiling. “I have been a police officer for 40 years,”…
Open Grave by Kjell Eriksson is the 6th Nordic mystery featuring Police Inspector Ann Lindell where a Nobel Prize winner is greeted with jealousy and violence (available July 14, 2015). I don’t have a great deal of experience with Scandinavian authors. I have read the Stieg Larsson novels. And I’ve read a couple books by…
I hate watching reruns of mystery and crime TV shows I’ve already seen—it’s not much fun to tune in when you already know who did it. And, while the networks offer plenty of summer replacements, this season, none captured my attention as much as the shows I enjoy the most. So, while I’ve been longing…
The best things in life come in threes, and this sweepstakes proves it with a contemporary high-tech Swedish trilogy, three of the Clifton Chronicles, set in the U.K. in the aftermath of WWI, and if that weren’t enough, another bonus trifecta of internationally celebrated crime novels! Click here to enter for a chance to win!…
