Unwanted

"A mother who didn't care at all must be worse than one who cared too much."

Little Lilian Sebastiansson vanishes from a crowded train in broad daylight, leaving only a pair of shoes. Her mother, stuck at the previous station, alerts the authorities immediately, who assume it must be a custody row. Only when none of the clues adds up does Alex Recht's special team start to look outside the custody box. Fredrika Bergman, civilian recruit, can't believe how stuck in their ways this crack team is. Peder Rydh can't believe how Fredrika is favoured over proper policemen. Meanwhile more children are disappearing...

Ohlsson is only the second author of Scandicrime whose work I have enjoyed (after Stieg Larsson - reviews of his Millenium trilogy show more 1, 2, 3) - I struggled with Asa Larsson and have yet to get through more than 10 pages of a Jo Nesbo novel. I've been listening to Camilla Läckberg's The Stone Cutter for a while now and if she would only stop introducing new strands of story more than half way into the book I think I could get along with that too.

Ohlsson manages to keep herself to two main story threads, with a strong bias towards the police narrative (good) and only occasional changes of perspective to characters outside the main cast. She's not afraid to write fairly graphic domestic abuse and give her thorough knowledge of police workings, her biography page did not surprise me:

Kristina Ohlsson (b. 1979) is a political scientist and until recently held the position of Counter-Terrorism Officer at OSCE (the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe). She has previously worked at the Swedish Security Service, the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Swedish National Defense College, where she was a junior expert on the Middle East conflict and the foreign policy of the European Union.

I suspect much of the motivation for writing a somewhat unconventional female protagonist, as well as the relatively dark nature of the crimes described, come from her former working life. It's certainly gripping.

In terms of the common denominator between the women whose children are taken, I worked it out pretty early, but possibly because I'm quite sensitive to the topic. I'd be surprised if you got all the way to the reveal without figuring it out, but I certainly didn't know who the bad guy was until the police stormed his flat. You'd struggle to know who he was earlier I think - a minor criticism of the book I have - because he isn't someone who floats in and out of the story in the way the criminal does in most police procedurals (I've started guessing who the perpetrator is in Castle by noting which characters are introduced in the 8-12 minute phase...).

Time for a minor rant/apparently cultural observation.

There seem to be a few common elements to a Scandicrimenovel that I just need to get used to: fairly very liberal sexual ethics and repeated mention thereof, running a parallel storyline from the perspective of the bad guy without really tieing into the main storyline at all for a long time, and lots of in-fighting in the police force/investigative forces.

It's the relationships stuff that gets to me - I've whinged in the past about useless adulterous male protagonists and we have got a serious one in this novel (although to her credit, Ohlsson paints him as a fairly unpleasant character who happens to be a decent policeman, which is quite a change from the stock good/bad cop). I just find it quite strange to be pottering along, here's a new character being mentioned, little more, oh ok switch to the perspective of the new character BAM all their relationship history and their current top three relationship issues which are all tangled up with each other and causing major problems aaaaand back to the plot. Minimal *other* history - education, family, upbringing, faith, other hobbies... Is this a cultural thing? In the Millenium trilogy, lots of reviewers noted that all the characters seemed to do was drink lots of coffee and hop into bed between hacking hard drives!

OK rant over. In general, enjoyable, quite fast-paced but plenty of scope for character development, and I was really glad to have the sequel on hand to read straight after this! show less

‘“It said ‘Unwanted’ on her forehead. But it wasn’t true. I never regretted having her. She was the best thing that ever happened to me.”’

A child has gone missing, has been taken in a compartment in a Swedish train. The compartment was full of people, and the train supervisor had only left for a few minutes, but no one could identify the person carrying the child away.



One day later, the distraught mother receives a box of her child’s clothes, all neatly folded – with the exception of her panties, which were missing – and her child’s hair.



That evening, the child is found dead, lying in the rain outside the hospital. The cause of death was an injection of morphine into the back of her head, and no traces of show more fingerprints or DNA could be found. Everything had been meticulously arranged and the word ‘Unwanted’ had been scrawled on her forehead.

The next day, another child is abducted, this time right out of her crib whilst the mother was in the next room. The next afternoon, she, too, was found dead, this time curled in foetal position in an elderly couple’s washroom. Again, no DNA could be found of the child’s body. Again, she was killed by a morphine injection on the back of her head.

The investigation team’s countdown is shorter than ever as they race to stop a seemingly unchained series of murders, linked only by the word ‘Unwanted’ scrawled on their forehead. The noose is drawn on the wrong people, the unhelpful people, and, ultimately, the right person.

***

This thriller had me sitting on the edge of my seat as I followed them through their investigations. It was a thoroughly enjoyable read, dampened only by the anti-feminist theme I felt prevailed throughout the whole book.

‘A pug; that was her. And pugs shouldn’t play with the big dogs like Peder and Alex.’

Both members of Fredrika’s team, especially Peder, dismissed her ideas as worthless without even thinking them through. And even in the end, when they realized Fredrika was right, they only very reluctantly gave overdue credit.

‘Alex and Peder had impatiently dismissed her attempt to try to unravel the information in the woman’s call, asking her to focus on ‘real, concrete scenarios’ rather than the invented variety.’
‘Alex had had enough, and quite forgot that he had been full of praise for Fredrika just a moment before.’

This book is one of the few that are successfully narrated by different characters throughout the story – it didn’t cause confusion because the characters were all so clearly defined, and it helped readers understand the reason behind their actions.

The dramatic irony of the whole plot did not dampen the suspense of the whole plot, but instead heightened it, as well as giving the reader a sense of grimness as we watch two children get killed all the while knowing that they were doing it all wrong, that they were wasting their time pursuing the line of investigation.

I heartily recommend this book to people looking for intense psychological thrillers. It is well-explained without dragging on, suspenseful without being frustrating, and the ending left readers hungering for more. show less

Sara Sebastiansson steps off the train to make a phone call during a short delay leaving her young daughter, Lilian, asleep in her seat. When she hangs up, she realizes that the train is pulling away without her, with Lilian still on the train. By the time she catches a taxi and meets the train in the next city, Lilian is gone. The police are immediately called and the team assigned to investigate this case consists of Alex, a legend in his own police force for the number of previous crimes he's solved, and his two main detectives, Peder, an ambitious young cop, and Fredrika, one of the new breed of graduate entrants. Both Alex and Peder seemed to me to be unsympathetic characters who dislike Fredrika on various grounds but primarily show more because she's an educated woman who believes in modern policing methods. The two men are quick to dismiss Fredrika's instinct that the young woman with the dog needs investigation, insisting on trying to find their top suspect, Lilian's father, who is estranged from the girl's mother.

This story starts well and I was initially very engaged in it. However, as the story developed I have to say it became very similar to many others. Often that seems to be the case with an author's first book and they just needs another book or two to develop the characters a bit more. I did enjoy it for the most part and have already checked out the second book by this author, Silenced. show less

This was much better translated than many Swedish crime novels I have read, and I raced through it. I liked the police officers, and there was just enough of their personal lives to flesh them out without slowing down the plot. It was dark in places, although it did not linger there unnecessarily. I did work out what was going on far earlier than the police did, which was frustrating, but I'm looking forward to the next in the series.

This is the first volume in the Fredrika Bergman series. You get to know many of the people she works with.
A little girl disappears from a train. Who has kidnapped her? What secret is her mother hiding? Investigators Alex Recht, Fredrika Bergman and Peder embark on a race against time. The three of them don't always agree on how to investigate, but they each make progress in their own way. First the child's father is suspected. He has a dark secret, but is he the kidnapper? When the girl is found dead and another child disappears soon afterwards, the investigators realise that they first have to find out what the children's mothers have in common.
A very exciting and fast-paced crime thriller. I will certainly read the other books as well.

Kristina Ohlsson may be relatively young (30 when she wrote this), but unlike most crime writers she has actually worked in the police and justice services. This was her first novel, and she's published another nine books since 2009, so she's no slouch. Frederika Bergman, a police investigator with academic credentials, is the character who links up with the later novels in the series and who seems to have a similar background to the author, but - rather like the Martin Beck novels - the narrative is in multiple point-of-view form, giving roughly equal prominence to several members of the investigating team. The plot is based around a fairly generic serial-killer formula, with a nicely executed false lead to make it more interesting. show more The tensions between the members of the police team were a little bit routine, but they were kept low-key enough not to be an irritation. I was strongly reminded of the later Martin Becks by the way the author felt obliged to give us a sociological underpinning for the criminal's descent into evil. There is clearly meant to be a political message here about violence and power in relations between men, women, and children, but it's advanced with some delicacy. You can't rule out the possibility that the lover you think you know well might have a double life as a psychopath, but it's probably vanishingly small...

Overall I found this a good debut novel: nothing stunningly interesting, but enough entertainment to keep the reader engaged, and no serious annoyances. The translation might have been a bit bland, but I didn't really notice I was reading a translation, so it was probably doing a good job. show less

Sara Sebastiansson steps off the train to make a phone call during a short delay leaving her young daughter, Lilian, asleep in her seat. When she hangs up, she realizes that the train is pulling away without her, with Lilian still on the train. By the time she catches a taxi and meets the train in the next city, Lilian is gone. The police are immediately called and the team assigned to investigate this case consists of Alex, a legend in his own police force for the number of previous crimes he's solved, and his two main detectives, Peder, an ambitious young cop, and Fredrika, one of the new breed of graduate entrants. Both Alex and Peder seemed to me to be unsympathetic characters who dislike Fredrika on various grounds but primarily show more because she's an educated woman who believes in modern policing methods. T he two men are quick to dismiss Fredrika's instinct that the young woman with the dog needs investigation, insisting on trying to find their top suspect, Lilian's father, who is estranged from Sara, the girl's mother.

This story starts well and I was initially very engaged in it. However, as the story developed I have to say it became very similar to many others. Often that seems to be the case with an author's first book and they just needs another book or two to develop the characters a bit more. I did enjoy it for the most part and have already checked out the second book by this author, Silenced. show less