Another day, another Scandinavean detective. I’m quite probably addicted to them now. Ake Edwardson is a popular Swedish crime writer who’s written a series of novels featuring Inspector Winter. This is the first of them to be translated into English although it’s clearly not the first in the actual series. It always perplexes me a bit that we invariably get series such as these published out of order. I bet the Swedish versions of Harry Potter have been published in order.
There seems to be a relatively well-observed law in crime fiction that either we open with the crime, or scene of the crime, or we have some prose that’s coming from inside the mind of the killer. While we do get a bit of the latter, unusually, this book takes a leisurely 150 pages before we actually learn of the crime committed.
That’s not to say that nothing’s going on as that couldn’t be further from the truth. But nothing in this book is really rushed. The investigation takes time, and we pass that time.
I thought it was a great book and Edwardson’s next in English has just been published in hardback so I’m sure a few more are to follow.