Sail of Stone (2002)

I read all of this author's other books, most of them twice, but I had great difficulty understanding Sail of Stone and couldn't finish it which is unusual for me. ( )

Beginning in Gothenburg, Sweden, this latest in the series featuring Chief Inspector Erik Winter moves mysteriously back and forth between Sweden and Scotland. Writing in his stream of consciousness style, Edwardson takes us inside the heads of Chief Inspector Winter, who travels to Scotland on the trail of a missing person who just happens to be the father of an old girl friend. Winters wrestles with his own feelings as well as the questions involved in a case where the only living witness suffers from dementia.
The old girl friend and her brother report their father missing after he has gone off to Scotland, possibly in search of his own father, who disappeared off the coast of Scotland at the beginning of World War II. When they don’t hear from him for several days, they assume the worst, but how do they begin?
At the same time, detective Aneta Djanali is searching for a woman who may be the victim of abuse, if she could only be located. Her investigations lead to the discovery of a ring of thieves who are systematically cleaning out apartments in Gothenburg, and the missing woman’s father may, or may not, be involved.
The story is realistic in the way the characters’ thoughts wander to personal issues even as they strategize about how to approach the cases they are working on. Inevitably their personal issues and relationships become intertwined with the cases.
Sail of Stone is a journey into the minds and emotions of the characters as well as the physical journey from Sweden to Scotland, and this physical journey becomes the crux of the solution to Winter’s feelings about his life, and well as providing the solution to a 70 year old mystery. ( )

I'm not sure what to say about this book. The writing and the characterization are excellent, the settings interesting, and the mysteries are intriguing. A woman who may have been the victim of domestic abuses disappears, her apartment is cleaned out, and detective Aneta Djanali can't find the woman, and her own family is no help. Everyone around the missing woman acts suspiciously, including her ex-husband and his sister. And in the other mystery, an old flame of Chief Inspector Erik Winter comes to him because her father seems to have disappeared on a trip to the Inverness area of Scotland, and she needs help to find him. The disappearance is related to a letter he received suggesting that his own father, who apparently died when his fishing boat went down off the Scotland coast during the war, might still be alive. I just had to keep reading to find out what had happened in both cases and why. Did I find out the answers? Well, partially, at least. But in this book the journey to find the answers is interesting and memorable and the story stays in the mind after you turn the final page. I read Frozen Tracks some time ago, which is the Erik Winter story immediately preceding this one. It was also a great and memorable mystery. I plan to go back and read the first 4 books in the series that I have missed. Be aware that they have not been translated in the right order, so you can't go by the English publication dates when reading the series. ( )

After receiving a strange note, a Swedish man travels to Scotland to investigate his own fisherman father's death (presumed lost) at sea decades before -- during the war. Could he be still alive? It was known that fishing vessels sometimes braved the mine-infested sea to bring their catch and other items into the UK. The man is not heard from for days and his adult children become concerned and contact detective Erik Winter. Winter's investigation takes him from the harbors of Sweden eventually to Scotland.

In another part of the city, neighbors repeatedly report possible domestic violence, but when detective Aneta Djanali arrives the woman refuses to open the door. Several days later she finds the apartment being cleaned out by the young woman's father and brother. The situation doesn't sit well with the detective because she's not actually made full contact with the young woman, so she chases down the location of the parents' house and—surprise—the woman's father is not the "father" that was cleaning out the apartment and the young woman is no where to be found. The plot thickens.

Although it took me about 80 pages to settle into this book, I was eventually rewarded with another excellent police procedural. Edwardson seems to eschew the titillation and gratuitousness of so many popular crime novels these days in favor of an interesting story, acute observation and excellent character development (I wonder if it might be the influence of his journalistic background). I think this is now the 5 or 6th Erik Winter book to be translated into English. ( )

Atmospheric entry in the Erik Winter series. Winter is more well-rounded in this story than in previous ones, and is thinking about building a house by the sea for his family. An old girlfriend asks for his help finding her missing father, who departed to look for his missing father who disappeared after traveling to Scotland. He ends up traveling to Scotland to find out what has happened, looking into it with a British detective he knows well. Meanwhile Winter's colleague, Anete Djinali, is looking into a case nobody else seems to take seriously. Neighbors have reported that a woman is a victim of domestic violence; her husband has left, her family has swooped in and scooped her up, and Anete can't help but feel something is terribly wrong. Both stories proceed without great urgency, but in prose that is oddly poetic. I enjoyed it, though Edwardson's cops never seem to have much on their plates and operate more on intuition and meditation than anything else.