Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
A second course of revenge served cold challenges DS Alex Recht, civilian consultant Fredrika Bergman and the rest of Sweden's Criminal Investigation Division (Unwanted, 2012). Fifteen years after a prologue presents a young girl's rape as she picks flowers during a Midsummer's Eve ritual decreed by her family, Alex's group is charged with investigating two seemingly unrelated cases. One is the hit-and-run death of an unidentified man. The other is the apparent murder-suicide of Jakob Ahlbin, assistant vicar of the Bromma Church, and his wife Marja, a cantor at the church. The Stockholm-based investigators are ill-prepared for the pressure under which they'll have to operate. Alex fears that his unit is about to be disbanded and its members dispersed among other crime-fighting units; Fredrika is pregnant by her lover of 10 years, a married professor at Uppsala University; Peder Rydh, recently separated from his wife, Ylva, and dumped by his lover, Pia Nordh, is in hot water for his off-color remarks to a luscious new trainee. All of them would be even more uncomfortable if they knew that half a world away, in Bangkok, a woman intimately connected with their current caseload is finding her official identity systematically erased, as she's stripped of her email accounts, her money, her identification papers, her hotel room and her name. The thread that links these mysteries involves crooked cops, neo-Nazis, identity theft, murder for hire, the smuggling of illegal immigrants, a pair of sisters whose falling out has turned them into enemies willing to fight to the death and a wounded soul with a long memory. A Chinese box of a procedural that manages to link together not only a varied bunch of felonies and motives, but its detectives' equally unruly personal lives as well.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
Frederika Bergman returns in the latest installment from Swedish author Ohlsson. Frederika is the only civilian working with Alex Recht's federal investigation unit, but you wouldn't know this was her book until the very end. The novel opens with the rape of a teenage girl in Frederika's own backyard. Then we fast-forward several years to a priest and his wife, who are killed in an apparent murder-suicide; in a seemingly unrelated incident, a man is killed in a hit-and-run accident. Alex and his team, including the very pregnant Frederika, start investigating, and things are not at all how they first appeared to be. Human trafficking is going on, from the Middle East through Bangkok and then to Sweden. OK, but then things really get twisty. The story slowly unfolds, revealing layer upon layer of deception. The interplay between the detectives adds another level of interest to this intriguing puzzle, as do the inner workings of a foreign police department. This Scandinavian procedural, though less gristly than most of the genre, should appeal to international-mystery fans.--Alesi, Stacy Copyright 2010 Booklist
Publishers Weekly
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Early in Ohlsson's deftly plotted second Fredrika Bergman mystery (after 2012's Unwanted), a Stockholm vicar and his cantor wife are found dead in their bedroom, an apparent murder-suicide, but no one close to the couple believes that Jakob Ahlbin would have shot his wife with a hunting pistol and then turned the gun on himself. Bergman and her colleagues in the Stockholm police's Criminal Investigation Division begin to doubt the murder-suicide theory, even though Ahlbin, a vocal supporter of immigrant rights, suffered from depression and was despondent over his older daughter's recent death from a heroin overdose. Meanwhile, a hit-and-run accident turns into a homicide, and other bodies pile up. Could these deaths be connected to the vicar's murder? The many separate stories and viewpoints make for a sluggish start, but Ohlsson expertly pulls all the pieces together to ultimately form an intricate whole. Agent: Niclas Salomonsson, Salomonsson Agency. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.