Publisher: Simon and Schuster
SYNOPSIS:
The brand new thriller featuring Investigative Analyst Fredrika Bergman and Alex Recht of the Stockholm police.
On a cold winter's day, a pre-school teacher is shot to death in front of parents and children at the Jewish Congregation in Stockholm. Just a few hours later two Jewish boys go missing on their way to tennis practice. A heavy snowstorm hits Stockholm and the traces of the perpetrator are few and far between.
Fredrika Bergman and Alex Recht are faced with one of their toughest challenges ever as they hunt for a killer that seems as merciless as he is effective. The leads in the investigation are many and diverse but in the end they all point to the same place: Israel. Someone or something called the Paper Boy keeps popping up in the police investigation. But who was he really? And could he possibly have resurfaced in Stockholm, now claiming new victims?
REVIEW:
I am a huge fan of Scandinavian Crime so every chance I get to slip between the covers is always grabbed with both hands, especially as I love the way that the landscape works wonderfully well with the darker aspects of humanking. However when I jump into a series, what gets me, is how accessible it is to not only an established reader but a relatively new one, who just happened to puck the book up by accident.
Whilst this is the fifth book in Kristina’s Bergman & Recht series, it does give the reader characters that have grown since the original although for me, whilst I did enjoy it, I had a few problems. However for me, what made this not as good as the previous outings was the flow problems of the language in places and whilst the previous books didn’t seem to have this problem, I suspect it was something more of a translation problem rather than an author error. Don’t get me wrong it is solid but when you’re taken out of the scene you’re reading and left thinking I’d have phrased it this way or that way, it interrupts your reading so much that it takes a while to get back in.
All round, it is a good read but when I compare it to what I’ve enjoyed previously it sadly leaves me feeling a bit flatter, especially when in places it seems to over compensate to get plot across by rushing through certain aspects without allowing the characters to grow in the same ways that thy have previously. For me, if you want a top notch Kristina title start at the beginning and work your way through and whilst against others the book is still strong, against her own, for me, it’s the weakest.
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