Slow and steady: Sweden’s youngest Detective Inspector seeks elusive clues in this slow, plodding police procedural about a murder victim that takes half the book to identify. Erik Winter, the dapper inspector who likes expensive clothing and cars, and finds it difficult to grow up to a maturity in relation to his girlfriend’s desire for more permanence, is an intuitive, careful thinker confronted, in this second installment in a Swedish noir series, with almost no clues about the victim [or murderer], other than that she has borne a child.
The plot switches back and forth between the present-day investigation and flashbacks, so the reader – this reader, at least – is at a loss as to where the story is at. It is confusing at best, yet interesting, from a psychological point of view. There are some idioms the translator apparently inserted into the text which have no obvious counterpart in Swedish.
Having struggled over a longer period of time to read the novel than would be devoted ordinarily to a book of this length, it is with ambivalence that it is recommended, solely on the basis that it is an interesting work.
