Frozen Tracks

Seltsames passiert in Göteborg: Mehrere Studenten werden nachts von einem Unbekannten niedergeschlagen und beinahe umgebracht. Niemand will etwas gesehen haben, kein Opfer das andere kennen. Kommissar Erik Winter steht vor einem Rätsel: Wo ist das Muster, wo der Zusammenhang? Andere Ereignisse beunruhigen den gerade aus dem Erziehungsurlaub zurückgekehrten Vater allerdings mehr. Ein paar Kinder wurden angeblich von einem "Onkel" aus der Tagesstätte mit dem Auto entführt, aber unbeschadet wieder abgeliefert. Noch ist keinem Kind wirklich etwas passiert, aber das kann sich jederzeit ändern. Doch Winter und sein Team tappen im Dunkeln. Bis langsam deutlich wird, dass beide Fälle auf grausame Weise miteinander verwoben sind. Vier show more Fälle lang haben die Leser den Göteborger Kommissar Erik Winter bei seiner Entwicklung vom einsamen Jäger zum Teamkämpfer, vom coolen Einzelgänger zum Ehemann und Familienvater begleitet. Mit Der Himmel auf Erden liegt nun der fünfte Kriminalroman des schwedischen Bestsellerautoren Ake Edwardson vor: blutarm, aber das nur im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes. Die Grausamkeit der Verbrechen ist hier nicht in Liter Blut pro Seite zu bemessen. Wie so oft bei Edwardson ist das Geschehen vor allem deshalb so erschreckend, weil es die beinahe logische Folge einer brutalen, entmenschlichten Gesellschaft ist. Wer sind die Täter, wer die Opfer? Die Grenzen verschwimmen in Der Himmel auf Erden. Am Ende herrscht Stille -- und eiskaltes Entsetzen beim Leser. "Heaven is a place on earth", schnulzt an einer Stelle im Buch Belinda Carlisle im vorweihnachtlichen Göteborg. "Das ist unsere Aufgabe", meint Winters Kollege Halders, "die Erde zum Himmelreich zu machen." "Es ist umgekehrt", antwortet Winter mit resigniertem Zynismus: "Der Himmel ist ein Erdenreich." --Beate Strobel show less

In the weeks before Christmas several police stations in Gothenburg receive phone calls from parents who think their children might have, temporarily, been kidnapped by ‘a mister’. However because the incidents are minor (the children are unhurt and parents aren’t even sure the children whether the children have imagined things) and not logged centrally no one realises there might be a pattern of crimes emerging. At the same time DCI Erik Winter and his team are investigating a series of apparently random but brutal bashings of young men in the city. Both sequences of events begin to gain momentum while the personal lives of the investigating team take a battering too.

I’ve not read the previous two books in this series that have show more been translated into English but I don’t think I am at much disadvantage. I was quickly engaged by the eclectic investigative team who are dogged, introspective and quite funny. There’s a mildly insulting banter that is depicted between the team that lightens an otherwise quite sombre book and I thoroughly enjoyed that aspect (and kudos to the translator for this in particular as I think humour must be the most difficult thing to get right). At different times though team members can be emotional with each other, such as when Winter is consoling his friend and colleague Bertil Ringmar, and this depiction of people being affected and conflicted by events in their personal and professional lives is very compelling. Edwardson does a good job too at showing the effects of crime on victims and their families and also the families of investigators although the same depth wasn’t really visible with the main suspect who I found to be a bit stereotypical.

The story is, for the most part, well constructed although I did find the ending a little more convoluted than it needed to be. However the parallel cases are developed nicely with a realistic sense of wrong turns and dead ends and any linkages between the two threads are plausible. There are some slow points in the pacing which could easily have been removed by tighter editing and I am, again, at a loss to explain why books are so much longer these days than their counterparts from 10 or 20 years ago.

Edwardson has an odd style of writing in which a good deal of the action is inferred rather than described explicitly and many of the facts of the story are revealed through conversations between the team members rather than pure narrative description. I can understand that this might be frustrating for some readers as it leaves quite a few things unknown but it gave me the feeling that I was eavesdropping on a current investigation rather than reading a report once the case had been closed and I liked the immediacy and unpredictability this offered. show less

Review: Frozen Tracks by Ake Edwardson. 10/21/2017

It takes some time to get used to Ake Edwardson’s writing style but once I got use to it the story moved along. His writing at times slows down the story but it’s haunting and psychologically clever. The author doesn’t create a lot of suspense but his plot is well developed and he isn’t cautious when describing how the violence effects or the emotions it leaves behind for the reader. Edwardson creates great characters and I enjoyed the police procedurals but wished the investigator would pep-up some so I won’t figure out what comes next before he does.

The story setting is Gothenberg, Sweden and feathers Detective Erik Winter and his team investigating a sudden rash of assaults show more on male college students, who have been bludgeoned from behind suffering severe head trauma. The mark left on the head is some kind of symbol as if the person was branded. Detective Winter has his hands full with another unconnected case that he just obtained. This case is a sudden simultaneous abduction of four-year-old nursery school children who are lured into a car by tempting a child with candy. This case puts stress and pressure on Detective Winter because it places his daughter in danger who attends one of the understaffed schools that was hit by the predator. Members of his team are also showing signs of intense personal issues which affect their focus on crime.

There is high priority on both of these cases which holds Winter’s back from his plans of traveling for Christmas. Because of the nature of the crimes it was more important to show leadership and team work. Some of the facts about the cases are revealed through a flow of vital information among team members. Plus, it was a plus when the author disclosed much of the sordid secrets behind the crimes. The story kept me interested throughout the book… show less

It's a Swedish police procedural, the lead character being Chief Inspector Erik Winter. He and his team are facing two worrisome cases, one in which young men are being attacked on the head with some sort of tool, and another in which small children are reporting that they sat in a car with a "mister". Overall it's not a bad book, but it's slow getting going. I also found it a little difficult to follow the thread of the story because the author has a habit of not telling you directly what has happened--instead you have to figure it out from some quite naturalistic dialogue.

Edwardson brings together two seemingly separate threads: assaults on young male university students, and child abductions. The Gothenburg CID knows about the first because a couple of the students sustain life threatening injuries and end up in hospital. Knowledge about the child abductions accumulates only slowly, pointing up a hole in Sweden's decentralised policing system. Parents report severally to their local police station stories their 4 year olds are relating about being taken for a ride in a car, a "mister" who has offered them sweeties. But no-one connects the dots until it is nearly too late, and the stories remain just that, local reports that are never passed on to a central office.

Christmas is approaching, and the show more various members of DCI Erik Winter's team have their own personal problems, one recovering from recent bereavement, one a wife leaves home unexpectedly, and Winter's own family wants to visit his mother on Costa del Sol. As Christmas gets closer the pressure rises, and in neither investigation are there any reliable witnesses, although the reader sees some of the abduction thread through the eyes of the abductor.

'This is the country we have built, the new Jerusalem,' said Winter.

Like his more famous country man, Henning Mankell, for whom this is often a theme, Ake Edwardson asks how life in Sweden has come to this.

I'm not sure however that I found the final tying off of the threads particularly credible.
It also seemed to me that Edwardson used the idea that police investigators are routinely, because of economic pressures, required to deal with more than one case at once, as a justification for writing a complex novel in which the same team was required to handle two "serial" threads. I suspect also that it provided for him, as the author, a technically difficult writing challenge - or am I just being a little too cynical? show less

I found it hard to engage with this book as it had a theme of child abjection and abuse running through it with which I'm never comfortable. There were also too many players for me to keep track of. Despite this I do think Edwardson's sense of narrative is more secure and flows more easily.

I picked up this copy at a library sale recently, and it appears to be the third in a series or the third to be translated into English.

The detectives in the city of Gothenburg are very busy, not only do they have a mysterious attacker who is bashing young men in the back of the head with some kind of long-handled instrument (despite 4 attacks, no one is dead yet), but they are also getting some unsettling reports from parents who tell them their children said they have sat in a car with a strange man (yes, of course, he had candy!) I know it says on the book that this is a DCI Erik Winter novel, but the story follows at least four detectives (all male, a few token women officers play minor roles) in their investigations into these two show more complex cases which makes for a fairly congested mystery — congested in a good way.

Apparently Winter (did I mention how weird it was to keep reading "Winter" in the sentences of a Swedish crime novel?) was a bit of a detective prodigy as a very young man but now that he's middle-aged his giftedness seems to only be good detective work and a bit of a sixth sense/intuition (allegedly more than the usual "hunch" but it didn't really seem extraordinary). And I may be wrong about this, I haven't read the first two books. Winter, btw, has a live-in partner (a woman) and a very young daughter.

So, this is a well-done, congested, complex mystery which builds very slowly. By the time you reach page 270 or so, you can't put it down...and you have 100 pages to go! This certainly is another great Swedish crime novel - right up there with Mankell's. Makes one wonder what's in the water up there... show less