KDL Recommends

For Detective Chief Inspector Erik Winter, the days seem even shorter and 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.

Third in the award-winning and internationally acclaimed Swedish mystery series that is taking U.S. reviewers and crime fiction readers by storm, this latest installment tells the tale of three brothers who encounter a duplicitous and deadly stranger.

The Inner Circle opens with an international group of young archeology students sweating on a dig on the island of Gotland, uncovering a Viking fortification dating back over a millennium. They are a fun-loving lot, partying together every night, but the good vibe turns to horror when one of them, twenty-one-year-old Martina Flochten, disappears. When her body is found a short while later, her injuries indicate that she is the victim of a ritual killing.

Erica Falck returns home to sort through her deceased parents’ belongings and work on her next book. But this is not the same hometown she grew up in. Upon finding out about a close friend’s suicide she decides to write her next book about the death while skillfully detailing how horrific secrets are never be completely buried and how silence can kill the soul.

A grisly torture-murder, a haunting northern Sweden backdrop, and a dark drama of twisted sexuality collide memorably in Åsa Larsson’s masterpiece of suspense.

Combine the chilly Swedish backdrop and moody psychodrama of a Bergman movie with the grisly pyrotechnics of a serial-killer thriller, then add an angry punk heroine and a down-on-his-luck investigative journalist, and you have the ingredients of Stieg Larsson’s first novel, all coming together to make this novel more than your run-of-the-mill mystery.

A devastating mistake drove Fredrik Welkin into a life as far as possible from his former position as a surgeon, where he mistakenly amputated the wrong arm of one of his patients. Now he lives in a frozen landscape. Each morning he dips his body into the freezing lake surrounding his home to remind himself he’s alive.

Van Veeteren and his associates are left bewildered by the curious murder of a man shot twice in the heart and twice below the belt. An utterly dull man, the only suspicious activity his surviving wife can report is a series of peculiar phone calls. Repeatedly the telephone would ring, offering no answer but an obscure pop song from the 1960s. This siren song would be linked to an identical murder, but the true connection remains unknown.

Beginning with the death of an unknown American citizen in Stockholm, the story slowly unravels into a complex web of international espionage, greed, sheer incompetence, and work by a poorly constructed Swedish intelligence force that in this fiction lead to the murder of the prime minister.

Piet Hoffman, a top secret operative for the Swedish police, is about to embark on his most dangerous assignment yet: after years spent infiltrating the Polish mafia, he’s become a key player in their attempt to take over amphetamine distribution inside Sweden’s prisons. To stop them from succeeding, he will have to go deep cover, posing as a prisoner inside the country’s most notorious jail.

When a well-known Swedish journalist disappears without a trace, inspector
Martin Beck has his summer vacation abruptly terminated to investigate
viperous Eastern European underworld figures and—at the risk of his life—stumbles upon the international racket in which the journalist was involved. With the coolly efficient local police on his side and a predatory nymphet on his tail, Beck pursues a case whose international implications grow with each new clue.

A young couple from Stockholm tries to start life afresh by reclaiming a long-neglected family manor. But in the Westins’ new home, there are things that cannot be repaired, lives that have gone wrong, and secrets that have followed them. When the family is struck by tragedy, it’s up to grief-stricken Joakim to put together a puzzle of inexplicable loss, unbearable suspicion, and tangled lives.

After Deputy Inspector Irene Huss and her team find a divorced teacher shot to death in his isolated cottage, his computer monitor marked with a bloody Satanic symbol, they visit his parents only to find them dead as well and with the same markings on their computer. The data on both machines was erased professionally, and the only viable lead, Jacob’s London-based sister, is too devastated by the dual tragedy to offer much assistance.