Helene Tursten

It’s not often that readers will find themselves rooting for a murderer, but you just can’t help liking 88-year-old Maud. She is definitely out for revenge when vengeance is needed, plotting intricate ways to get even. She is also incredibly kind and caring, ready to step in to save others who deserve saving. But beware if Maud thinks you are doing wrong! To say she is a complex person is an understatement. In this tale, she recalls “indiscretions” of her past when she boldly took show more matters into her own hands to correct what she perceived was a wrong. If it resulted in a death, oh well, so be it. She is an active and feisty 88-year-old, but has no problems playing the age card of a doddering old woman when it suits her. Well written, delightful, intriguing, and entertaining, this book is a wonder and so is Maud. show less

My thirteen-year-old actually checked this out at the library, then when he left it lying around the house it definitely piqued my curiosity. From the title to the cross-stitched skull and crossbones to the fact that it was translated (and tiny!), I told him that if it was good, I might want to read it after him. Later that night, after the kids' bedtime, he came downstairs and pressed it into my hands. "This book is crazy!" he said, and disappeared. It seemed implied that he liked it.

And show more wow, it didn't take long to figure out what he meant! Of course I expected that it would feature an elderly woman with sometimes nefarious purposes, but I didn't expect her to be the POV character, and I didn't expect her to be so wickedly relatable!

This quickly took Nimona's place as my therapeutic alternate with How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS. To go from self-interested bureaucrats refusing to rise to the occasion to prevent needless deaths to Maud's casual and remorseless offings of people who kinda-sorta deserved it was quite refreshing.

The first three stories were perfection. I enjoyed the last two, which more closely fit a standard whodunnit format, a bit less, or else I would have easily given the whole thing five stars.

Not my usual reading, but so enjoyable. show less

Police detective Irene Huss and her Göteborg colleagues are called out to investigate a murder in a private hospital. When the power in the hospital went out and the emergency generator didn’t come on, an ICU patient died, and the night nurse was soon found dead in the generator room. The other night nurse is adamant that she saw a ghost in the stairwell – an apparition of a nurse who had hung herself in the hospital 50 years earlier. Irene and her colleagues are convinced that there show more must be a rational explanation for the ghost. But what is it? Who was the primary murder victim – the nurse or the patient? And what has happened to one of the day nurses, who has gone missing with no explanation?

The unusual setting in the private hospital interested me, as did the historical aspect of the mystery. The author still hasn’t hit her stride, as the pacing seems a little off. One of the plot lines doesn’t seem to be either a motive for the crime or a red herring and should have been edited out. This book had a different translator than the first book, and the translation seemed a little smoother.

I didn’t like Irene quite as well as I did in the first book. Jenny, one of Irene’s twin daughters, seems to be a problem teen. After falling in with the wrong crowd in the first book and being set straight by one of Irene’s colleagues, Jenny once again falls in with another group of troublemakers. I didn’t like that Irene covered up Jenny’s involvement in a criminal activity and lied to investigators about it. I wonder if there will be consequences for Irene as the series progresses? show less

Five quietly sinister and entirely plausible tales of a woman in her eighties who discovers she can get away with murder

This is a delightfully mischievous read, especially at Christmas, when one of the stories is set.

In Maud, Helene Tursten has produced as an intriguing villain: an old lady, happily solitary and financially secure, for whom other people are not entirely real, except in so far as they help or hinder her in taking care of herself. When people become problems, that is they pose show more a threat to her or those she cares for or disturb her peace or attempt to steal from her, Maud is happy to solve the problem permanently with a little bit of well-managed violence that results in a death the either looks accidental or cannot be reasonably attributed to Maud herself.

I can see that Maud's actions show her to be a psychopath but I still found myself cheering for her. The people she killed seemed to me to deserve killing. I'd certainly have thought of doing what Maud did but I wouldn't have had the nerve or the emotional distance to act on my impulse. I'm hoping that my admiration for Maud is a sign of the power of Tursten's writing and not my own incipient psychopathy.

I admired the way Maud could, when it served her purpose, turn herself into the not-quite-all-there, harmless-old-dear that people expect to see. She uses the way the young see the old as both camouflage and as a weapon. I'm more than twenty years younger than Maud but I can already see how my perceived age changes how I'm treated unless I act against type and I can imagine the glee of being a predator disguised as someone seen as so low threat that they're almost invisible.

The book contains five stories:
- An elderly lady has accommodation problems
- An elderly lady on her travels
- An elderly lady seeks peace at Christmas time
- The antique dealer's death
- An elderly lady is faced with a difficult dilemma

With each story, we learn a little bit more about how Maud came to her present circumstances. We don't get an explanation as to why she is as she is, rather we get a picture that her circumstances rather than he character have changed She now has the independence and the protective camouflage available to her to be herself and get away with it.

The last two stories are two different perspectives on the investigation into the death of an antique dealer. Tursten uses the antiques dealer's death to bring Maud to the attention of both of the detectives she's currently writing series about: Irene Huss, with ten novels in a series that started in 1998, and Embla Nyström, Huss's protegé with two revels in a series that started in 2014.

I tried "Inspector Huss" the first book in the series a while ago and abandoned it. My encounter with Maud was much more fun. The difference may be down to the twenty extra years that Tursten had practised her craft between the two books but I suspect that it's also to do with a change of translators and to listening to the audiobook version. So, I've decided to try the second Inspector Huss book, "Night Rounds" as an audiobook, in the hope of finding another series to read. show less