Camilla Grebe

"In a small town you’re always fully exposed to other people. And to yourself."

The skeleton of an infant girl is found near a cairn by teenagers making out. It's 2009. A place where a local legend about the Ghostly Child is centered. The cairn is like a ley line for the small village of Ormberg, a crossroads, attracting all sorts of misery and mystery.
Fast forward to 2017 and we have a young woman found dead near that same cairn, a police profiler Hanne Lagerlind-Schön, is found in the show more surrounding forest suffering from hypothermia memory loss, and her partner in life and work, has disappeared.
This gritty story is told in tandem by two people. Jake a teenage boy whose guilty secret impedes the investigation and Marlin the policewoman who was the teenager who found the skeleton all those years ago. Alongside murder we become privet to personal struggles of Jake and Marlin and their places within this tight knit community.
Set in the Arctic depths of Sweden this is a gripping story with twists that make your head spin. Ormberg is an unlikely area for a refugee asylum camp, as many of the townspeople obviously feel. And the reasons for the resentments of the townspeople are interestingly handled. The locals feel like a forgotten people who themselves have been displaced and forgotten by their own government. So resentments breed. But of course things are never this simple. The asylum seekers stories are juxtaposed against the brooding background of this small village where the people have become trapped in a cycle of poverty.
Grebe has handled the situation of Hanne whose loss of memory seems more and more likely to be the onset of dementia with dignity and compelling insight. If Hanne is suffering this illness, how has it not been seen before now?
The challenge of refugees within small communities, the grappling for understanding and acceptance amidst fears of change and loss is faced head on.
Underneath of course is the ongoing mystery of the dead, treated in brilliant Nordic noir fashion by Grebe
I must admit that at first I wondered where this was going. I wasn't too far in before I was totally hooked. I couldn't put this intriguing thriller down.

A NetGalley ARC show less

This is the second in the Swedish crime series featuring psychotherapist Siri Bergman and her best friend and colleague Aina Davidsson.

In this book, Siri and Aina along with their old classmate Vijay collaborate on a domestic abuse study. Siri and Aina are to run a trial self-help group that would be led by professional facilitators. This set-up allows the authors to describe, as part of the narrative, the various manifestations of abuse of women, what it feels like to them, and how they show more cope (or not) with it during and after it happens. Furthermore, this plot device allows them to speculate on the motivations for such abuse. Is it solely about power and control? Does any of it have to do with love, albeit in a twisted form? What about the role of women? Are they ever complicit, in terms of “asking for it”? How do you determine who is telling the truth in relationship conflicts?

When one of the cases turns deadly, there is a great deal of pressure to find the answers, because the perpetrator remains at large.

Parallel developments in the private lives of the protagonists who work on these cases (not only Siri and Aina but also their colleagues Vijay and Sven), complicate the investigation, because they too are asking questions about the nature of love, and whether the pain it can create is worth the risk.

This is not just a sociological thriller however; it is also very much a psychological thriller, with an increase in tension that doesn’t let up until the very astonishing ending.

Discussion: The authors do an excellent job. I’ve read other Scandinavian crime novels that embrace the topic of domestic violence, but these authors are better in two ways. One, they focus their descriptions on the feelings elicited by what happened rather than the salacious details, which make unpleasant reading in any event. Secondly, they are never didactic, but seamlessly integrate their concerns into the plot.

Evaluation: This series is better than much of the crime fiction coming out of Scandinavia lately. I love being gobsmacked by a crime novel, and this one does not dissapoint me.

I am especially impressed that it is a collaboration of two authors. The writing is always consistent; I would have never known! (Sisters Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff apparently write these books via email, each writing a chapter and sending it back to the other to continue the story. It should also be noted that Åsa Träff is a psychologist specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy.)

Moreover, unlike much crime fiction, this series would work great for book clubs. Many issues are raised about the nature of crime and punishment, the situation of women, and the nature of love and relationships that will evoke good discussions (as in fact it did for me and my husband while I was reading it!) show less

"As usual I feel a kind of sadness, but also a fascination with the irrepressible urge of human beings to kill each other."

There are three alternating narrators in the Scandi-crime novel from Sweden, including two of the investigators, Peter and Hanne, who have a complicated history. They haven't worked together in a while, and Hanne has learned that she is in the early stages of Alzheimer's, a fact that she is keeping from Peter. The third narrator is a young woman named Emma describing show more events taking place during the weeks before the crime. We are uncertain of her role, and don't know whether she is a victim or a perpetrator. And although she seems honest, we are not quite sure whether she's living in reality, and whether to trust her version of events.

As the book opens, the body of a beautiful woman lying in a pool of blood has been discovered in the home of Jesper Ore, the wealthy CEO of a fashionable retail chain. She has been decapitated, and police must first determine her identity. Jesper himself is missing.

I enjoyed this psychological thriller/police procedural. I tend to prefer my crime novels to have an emphasis on character, and not on shoot-outs. show less

Swedish detectives Peter Lindgren and Manfred Olsson are called to the scene of a gruesome crime. A young woman has been decapitated, and the head has been placed facing the door with her eyes propped open. It's remarkably similar to a crime they investigated ten years ago but the killer was never captured. The unidentified, murdered woman has been found in the home of Jesper Orre, a young clothing store CEO. A search for Jesper reveals he is also missing.

The narrative is told from the show more perspective of three characters, detective Peter Lindgren, Hanne Lagerlind-Schön, the consulting psychologist who helped with the prior case and is now coping with early-onset dementia, and Emma Bohman, a clerk in one of the Jesper's stores. Emma's story begins four weeks earlier and alternates with the story of Peter and Hanne in current time.

This is an excellent psychological thriller with a complex plot expertly written and translated from Swedish. I've never read any of the other books by Camilla Grebe but have discovered she is a wonderful writer, bringing plot, characters, and setting to life. I will definitely look for another book by this excellent storyteller. show less