The Shadow Woman

I had liked the first installment of the Erik Winter series by Åke Edwardson so much that I was eager to read the next one. Unfortunately I was quite disappointed!
This book has been published in English as The Shadow Woman.

The case is interesting enough: A young woman is found murdered on the shore of a lake in Göteborg, and there is no clue about who she is. Erik Winter, a wealthy investigator in his late thirties, is drawn into the case immediately and does his best to find out who the woman was, but it is proving to be very difficult. The stakes are even higher because the autopsy shows that the woman has given birth, so somewhere there might be a child in grave danger.

So yes, the premise is intriguing, but after a while the story show more just dragged on and on and I just hoped that something would happen. Moreover, I don't mind reading about the private lives of detectives, but in this novel it is too much, especially because it is equally depressing as the case. I know that this is nordic noir, but still, there must be something that creates a spark and that makes me want to read on. There are a few points where the plot does become more gripping, but as it evolves, it is taken over by the background story of a bank robbery and that did not interest me in the least. After 599 pages, I was just happy that it was over.
Having said that, I still somewhat like Erik Winter as a character, although I liked him much more in the first novel.

I will read the third book for three reasons: First, I enjoyed the first one immensely and am not ready yet to give up on this series. Second, my husband owns the third book as a physical copy and because of that I started reading this series, wishing to read it in order. Third, from that book onwards the series has been translated by another German translator who, according to the reviews, does a much better job and makes the books more readable, so I am curious about that.
If I don't like the third book considerably more than this one, I will abandon the series. show less

Book # 2, in Inspector Erik Winter series and book #5 in the English version

The order in which this series is translated in English is quite bizarre but don’t let this concern you this is a decent police procedural, intricately constructed and stuffed with details of crime investigations (way too much in my books). Most of all, this mystery stands on its own, no worries if you start here.

In a prose that is bleak, Mr. Edwardson takes as its backdrop the Biker War in Sweden in the mid-1990 however he only mentions this in the opening pages. As the tradition imposes the story opens with the discovery of a woman’s body and the following pages are taken up with Winter and his colleagues investigation into her identity and solving the show more murder. Their efforts are slow, excruciating slow, minutia details, pages after pages of boring discussions, interrogations, etc.…. As the story plods along there are talks about illegal immigrants, relations between Swedes and Danes and some personal anecdotes. We need persistence to be rewarded. Mr. Edwardson does come through in his own time but far too late for my enjoyment. With its stilted dialogue, choppy narrative, plot twists that are hard to follow and a story without charismatic characters, I would describe “The Shadow Woman” as a lackluster installment to this series and by far not my preferred.

Having said this, I will nevertheless see what “Sail of Stone” has in store for me….one day… show less

This is the most recently translated of Edwardson's 12 "Erik Winter" mystery novels. A young woman is found murdered and through the autopsy it's determined that she has had a child. The police are having difficulty identifying the woman and that's holding up further investigation into the murder. And then, if there is a child, where is he or she?

Although I'm developing a bit of a pet peeve about books being translated not in chronological order, I once again enjoyed one of Edwardson's well-written, complex police procedurals. Erik Winter is a young middle-aged, very talented police detective who seems to have developed his sense of intuition more than most. It was hinted at in the other four books I read, but it's a bit more overt in show more this book. This is the first of Edwardson's I've read since reading one of Fred Vargas's books. Her detective is quite overtly an anti-deductive reasoning, undisciplined and zen sort of guy - too foo for me - but with Edwardson, his intuitive powers are much more integrated into the deductive reasoning process, more a cerebral process than a spiritual process.

Intuition, of course, has been associated with the female, and I find it interesting that here, instead of it being demeaned or dismissed, his intuitive thoughts, when he shares them, are mostly respected.

This is a great series if you enjoy excellent, cerebral police procedurals which read like literary fiction (a la P. D. James). show less

During Sweden's outdoor summer Gothenburg Party, an undercover policewoman is attacked. In the middle of the August heat, a dead woman is found in a local park with no identification.

This is police procedural at its best. As with some crimes that take place, there are no immediate clues and it is only through the tenacious investigations by a determined homicide team who broaden their search to all directions, even grasping sometimes at the most fragile leads.

The author brings us into the world of Chief Inspector Erik Winter. Even with the identification of the dead woman seemingly leading nowhere, he still has a colleague in hospital, the victim of a brutal attack, and a shooting that takes place, also at the Gothenburg Party. The show more situations that take his attention away from the dead woman's investigations aren't placed as red herrings, but, I think, more as somewhat subtle sociological statements on the effects of immigration in Sweden, and to strike a more realistic note in the novel, the note being that most crime squads do not have the luxury of only working on one case at a time, but have to juggle multiple unconnected cases.

This is not a fast-paced thriller with a lot of action, so I'd recommend this only to readers who enjoy a slow, gradual and detailed look at peeling back layers of clues, and finding the connections between the past and the present. show less

Die Leiche einer Frau ohne Namen. Spuren, die alle ins Nichts zu weisen scheinen. Die aufgeladene Atmosphäre eines heißen schwedischen Sommers. Und ein verängstigtes Mädchen, das sich in dem Versteck, in dem es festgehalten wird, nach seiner Mutter sehnt. Kommissar Winter, dessen Vorliebe für guten Jazz und elegante Anzüge sich in Göteborg herumgesprochen hat, setzt sein ganzes psychologisches Feingefühl ein, um den Mörder - und das Mädchen - zu finden.

Working with a similar narrative pattern, this second book in the series is even more successful in showing how police work relies on endless hours of tedious detail-searching that can stretch on for months, come to a complete stand-still and then, through a new series of events starts up again, triggered by the occasional intuition that most likely is just the way all these details form a different image. Quite fascinating and exhausting to read.

I find Edwardson uses too many words on unimportant things and too few on important things like motive, means and opportunity. I wish I'd liked this more but the jumps between unrelated things were too great along with being unsure who was saying what and why left me confused much of the time.