Swedish Crime Writers Sweden has a large number of excellent crime writers, and many of them have been translated into English during the last decade or so. The most well-known among these are Kerstin Ekman, Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Karin Alvtegen, Carina Burman, Carin Gerhardsen, Mons Kallentoft, Maria Lang, Asa Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Camilla Läckberg, Jens Lapidus, Henning Mankell, Hakan Nesser, Liza Marklund, Helene Tursten, Kjell Eriksson, Arne Dahl (Jan Arnald), Mari Jungstedt, Inger Frimansson, Roslund Hellstrom, and Ake Edwardson. Some of them, like Kerstin Ekman, Maria Lang, Sjowall & Wahloo and Mankell, are already established as "stars" on the international crime book scene. Others, like Karin Alvtegen, Liza Marklund, Ake Edwardson, Eriksson, Inger Frimansson, Mari Jungstedt, Asa Larsson, Stieg Larsson, Hellstrom Roslund, Helene Tursten, and Hakan Nesser, have more recently become noted internationally for their crime novels. In addition, Jan Guillou is well established internationally as a writer of thrillers and historical novels. Why Swedes write such excellent crime and mystery novels is hard to say. One reason may be that the Swedes love to read crime, and that there is considerable demand for crime literature in Sweden. Apart from that, who knows? Here at ScandinavianBooks we will present these wonderful authors and their exciting books. While we feel we have come a long way, it will still take some time to do so, but we will attempt to add at least one or two books a week. We hope you enjoy our reviews, and even more that you will enjoy the books! Also, please feel free to contribute your own reviews (by email to us), or get in touch with us if you have materials you would like us to present or if you want to support the site. We really need assistance, in almost any shape or form! More Swedish Crime at this site: See our reviews of Sjowall & Wahloo's books! Here are also reviews of Henning Mankell's books (and more) and Stieg Larsson's wonderful The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. And more reviews of Swedish crime! See also the overview of authors and books reviewed here.

Box 21, by Roslund Hellstrom Box 21 (also published as The Vault) by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström is a strong, almost disgusting book about crime in Stockholm. The main story of the book is about trafficking, prostitution, sexual abuse, and drugs. It is a very ambiyuous book - one of the most ambitious recent crime books I have read. Two Lithuanian women, Lydia Grajaukas and Alena Sljusareva, are key figures in the story. They were lured to Sweden, having been promised good jobs and great future prospects. As it turns out, their jobs are to each serve 12 men sexually each day. As well, they find they are indebted over their heads, and that any attempt at protesting results in severe beatings. However, Lydia comes up with a plan. And her plan is what the book is about. And as it unfolds, we are brought face to face with a world of murder, whippings, torture, drug dealings and junkies, kidnappings, professional enforcers, corruption and cover-ups, and mafia bosses, as well as passionate reprisals. Box 21, the sequel to The Beast, is written in the Sjowall & Walloe tradition: It is full of implicit and explicit social critique. Again we meet detectives Ewert Grens and Sven Sundkvist. Their are magnificently described in the book. And the plot is truly great as well. Box 21 is not at all a pleasant story: Detective Grens is very difficult to like, even though he is well described in the book. He is full of anger and has moral failings. Grens and Sundkvist are not merely investigating the crime, they are also in different ways implicated in it. And we become implicated along with them. As well, the abuse and violence is very vividly portrayed in the book. And the theme and some of the viewpoints at display in the book are plainly disgusting. The Box is one of the most complex, involved, realistic and effective crime novels I know. The tough choices and moral dilemmas lived by the investigators seem very real. It is a an intense book, very much worth a read! See our review of The Beast as well! Links to the books by Roslund Helltrom at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN(in CAN, the are listed as authored by Roslund alone).

Island of the Naked Women, by Inger Frimansson

If you expect Island of Naked Women to be a soft porn novel, you are in for a disappointment. The title has a historical explanation, but is somewhat parenthetical to the content of the novel. Instead, this is another psychological thriller by Inger Frimansson, written is a style she masters to perfection. In 50 or so pages she sets the stage for an exciting and suspenseful novel with a tense atmosphere. And when things start to happen, the consequences are bad both in a real sense and psychologically – and it really feels as if they had to be bad, nothing else would have been right in the dark scene so vividly drawn by Frimansson.

In Island of the Naked Woman (superbly translated from Swedish by Laura Wideburg), writer Tobias Elmkvist, a Stockholm novelist with career troubles, tired and at times deeply depressed, returns to his childhood home in Ôstgötaland to visit and help his father, Carl Sigvard. His relationship to him is not good, as Tobias (wrongly) feels that his father is ashamed of him. Even so he feels that he now needs to help his father who is confined to his bed after having broken his leg.

When he arrives, he meets his father’s younger partner, the somewhat coarse Sabina Johansson, and finds himself strongly attracted to her. As it turns out, the attraction is mutual. And shortly after, as Tobias and Sabina give in to their desires in a barn tack-room, a disapproving local, Hardy Lindström, walks in and confronts them. Tobias gets scared, and plunges a screwdriver into Lindstrom’s throat. He thinks he has killed him. However, when he later returns to the barn, he finds no trace of the body and no blood. Was it a dream? Did he imagine it all?

Island of the Naked Women is more a psychological thriller than a mystery novel. There is no mystery in the book for the reader. Rather this is more a study of guild and emotions associated with it. It is well written and composed, and the characters are very intriguing, constructed in a manner that makes for strange dynamics and lots of tension. A good, suspenseful book with a tense atmosphere which I recommend.

Links to books by Inger Frimansson at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

Under the Snow, by Kerstin Ekman

Under the Snow is a psychological thriller. It is set in a small village in northern Sweden. It is the dead of winter when Police Constable Torsson, a policeman originally from central Sweden, receives a call from Rakisjokk that artist and teacher Matti Olsson has been killed, forcing Torsson into a 25-mile trek on skis across the frozen lake. When he arrives, however, the community is in a state of anxiety, and inhabitants are strangely reticent, stories do not match one another, unexplainable details appear, and Torsson is unable to blame anything except the fearful cold for Olsson's death.

It is only by accident that the case is reopened when Olsson's unsuspecting friend David Malm makes a summer visit and encounters a girl who has hit a reindeer with her car. In the car, Malm discovers a knapsack containing a bloody noose covered with human hair, and he forces Torsson to return to the isolated community, now bathed in perpetual sunlight. Slowly and painfully, the two penetrate the peculiar psychology of people who live half their lives in darkness, cut off from the rest of the world. Ekman's brilliant evocation of a place and culture above the Arctic Circle in Under the Snow is as compelling and mysterious as the crime itself.

David teams up with Torsson, and together they form an unexpected yet almost affectionate duo - they set out to get to the bottom of what happened that March night. They uncover a web of secrets. Everybody seems to have something to hide.

As a detective story Under the Snow contains a gallery of characters sufficiently strongly drawn for the solution to the puzzle to be a satisfactory and interesting one, and the mystery in the book has unexpected twists and wonderful characters that enspire humour, sympathy and contempt. An exciting and interesting book.

You can order Kerstin Ekman's Under the Snow from amazon UK as well!