Well drawn characters, good dialog and engaging plot. Hard to grasp Swedish names of Ilene's colleagues at first, but learning more about each helped me differentiate and get to know them.

Enjoyed and appreciated the novel's middle-aged woman's prospective. While sexism still huge problem in work places around the world, this novel succeeded in placing it in context of its lessening foothold.

I was also pleasantly surprised when Tommy, Irene's colleague and friend, calmly 'educated' Irene's twin daughters about Germany's accountability for its historical racism /anti-semitism before and during WWII. And the resulting loss of millions of innocent lives.

Thoroughly and thoughtfully written. Very good read despite running long.

Irene Huss serves as one of a handful of women policing Göteborg, Sweden. It is especially unusual for one to rise to her rank. She finds herself investigating a case in which a wealthy man appears to have ended his life in suicide, but she spots some irregularities and finds plenty of motives and suspects who might want the man dead. I had a very difficult time reading more than a chapter at a time until near the end. While long chapter lengths and reading before going to bed played a bit of a factor, it was more than that. The story just did not draw me in until near the end. If I had not been reading this as part of a group read, I would have abandoned it. I'll see if the series improves for me over the next couple of books. If the series continues to fall flat, I'll drop out of the group read. I will, however, give her a chance with the next couple installments. ( )

Irene Huss is one of the few women on the Göteborg police force. At 38, Irene is approaching middle age, with a chef husband and teenage fraternal twin daughters. Irene and her colleagues need to solve the murder of one of Göteborg’s wealthiest residents, Richard von Knecht. He fell to his death from the balcony of his apartment home. In her off-duty hours, Irene must find a way to reach one of her daughters who has fallen under the influence of a gang of skinheads.

Although the series title carries Irene’s name, this police procedural features the whole investigative team. Irene’s abilities are respected by most of her colleagues, at least most of the time, but her male colleagues rarely stand up for her in the face of sexist comments from the misogynists on the team. While this book has some shortcomings that aren’t uncommon to series debuts, it shows promise. The ending is a bit of a letdown, since the chief suspect, who left no evidence of the crime that the investigators could find, helpfully confessed to the murder. The occasionally awkward prose may be attributed to the translator getting used to the author’s writing style. The same thing happened in Camilla Läckberg’s Erica Falck & Patrik Hedström series, which has the same translator for four of its first five books. ( )

To me, the most interesting parts of the book that I read were about the day to day lives of the Inspector and her family. I found the short declarative sentence style annoying, and there were quite a few phrases that were very odd in translation, and after 50 pages I decided I just wanted to let it go.

I found the plot and characterization was excellent. The detail about the locale, people, and activities gave a lot of substance to the story. Thankfully I was able to find many of the places on maps.google.com and have some sense of geography--where things happened and geographic relationships. I will definitely read more Tursten and Inspector Huss. ( )