Krishna
After the success of the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series by Stieg Larsson, there have been a lot of interest in Swedish thriller authors and a lot of them used this to supply to the English language market. Kristina Ohlsson is one of them. I do not think any of the copycat authors achieved fame or following anywhere near that of Steig and this book kind of tells you why that is.
The prologue is very interesting and starts with a rape of an unnamed girl. When the story starts there is no mention of the prologue incident, and it nicely ties in at the end. But the narration, the scene setting and the conflicts leave a lot to be desired, if you are comparing this one to the Girl series of Steig mentioned above.
The main story itself starts with Ali travelling by plane from Iraq to Sweden. Pregnant Frederika is assigned to the case of a seeming suicide and murder case, where a pastor called Jakob appears to have murdered his wife and killed himself. The ostensible reason for his flying off the rocker is that his daughter Karolina is a drug addict and overdosed herself once and died. Before that can be properly investigated, there is another corpse of a vagrant who is as yet unidentified. Working with Frederika are two of her colleagues, Peder and Alex.
How are all these related? Are they even related? These are the questions that torment the investigators.
The scene shifts to Thailand. A Swedish girl in Thailand who, we learn, has an incriminating USB key. Her hotel denies her having had a room, she cannot contact any of her relatives in Sweden by phone, her USB and money are all stolen in a mugging incident, and now her own embassy denies she is who she is and says she is implicated in a crime in Thailand.
This is a classic frame up but who is behind this?
On top of that, there is the personal side of Frederika, who is dealing with her own pregnancy and her love for an older married man.
Interesting plot indeed but the trouble is that it is poorly written. Even the twists are a bit boring!
Alex and Peder discover that Jakob could not have killed the wife, that Karolina was not even a drug addict and that the younger daughter, who identified Karolina and then disappeared off the face of the earth, was mentally disturbed. All this supplied by Erik Sundelius, Jakob’s psychiatrist.
Investigation continues. Fredrika takes her lover to her parents’ house. He is as old as her father. So, we see that the attempt is to twine the personal with the thrilling investigation, but unfortunately, both fall flat. Why? The twists are weak. The sister who cannot be an addict is not one. How did they find out this and other things? People hide something that the police “sense” with no reason at all. This is their investigating process? Give me a break.
Karolina is the girl stuck in Bangkok, what a great twist… Yawn.
The twist about the real Karolina and the real Johanna regarding the refugees, as revealed in Johanna’s testimony to the detectives, is interesting.
The investigation is not according to clues as it would be in an Agatha Christie novel. It is based on multiple intuitions and also suddenly characters deciding to come clean for no visible reasons at all or being utterly unable to lie in interrogations. They “refuse to talk” about stuff rather than making up plausible scenarios. Weird.
Everyone comes forward and reveals all secrets like Elsie, Viggio’s mother. Viggio is the police officer, the brother of Mann. Mann is the boyfriend of Karolina but ruined due to drugs.
Karolina and Johanna are alternately suspected in the murders of their parents due to immigrant sympathy from Joseph and Marja Ahlbin. The ending is supposed to be a thrilling denouement, but all it provokes is another yawn.
The best thing that can be said about this book is that it is not abominable. Is it worth investing time to read? I think you will get poor returns for your investment.
Let us say a 4/10
– – Krishna