Review: THE SHADOW WOMAN, Ake Edwardson

• Format: Kindle (Amazon)
  
• File Size: 787 KB
• Print Length: 355 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0143117947
• Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (September 28, 2010) - it was originally published in Sweden in 1998
• Translated by Per Carlsson
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B003XQEVRG

Synopsis (Amazon)

It's August and the annual Gothenburg Party is in full swing. But this year the bacchanalian blowout is simmering with ethnic discord spurred by nativist gangs. When a woman is found murdered in the park-her identity as inscrutable as the blood-red symbol on the tree above her body-Winter's search for her missing child leads him from sleek McMansions to the Gothenburg fringes, where "northern suburbs" is code for "outsider" and the past is inescapable-even for Sweden's youngest chief inspector.

Chief Inspector Erik Winter investigates the murder of Helene Anderson, whose body was found in a local park. Armed with few clues, Winter soon learns that the young woman left behind a child who may still be alive. Further probing leads him more than two decades back in time to a bank robbery in Denmark that a very young Helene likely witnessed. (The perpetrators remain at large, a source of great frustration for local law enforcement.) Winter travels to Denmark, and soon a cold case turns hot. Back on the home front, the inspector must contend with the annual Gothenburg Party, a hedonistic free-for-all that prompts riots among nativist gangs. 

My Take

The novel begins

For three years a massive drug war between the Hells Angels and the Bandidos has ripped through Scandinavia. Antitank rockets swiped from the Swedish military have been launched at club-houses, gun fights have erupted in airports, car bombs have been planted and bystanders killed. A well-publicized truce will soo bring the Great Nordic Biker War to a close, but not before dozens of lives are claimed by the violence, many of them innocent.

While this foreword helps put the action of the novel in 1997 it also confused me until I realised the novel was a reprint.

It actually takes some time, and a lot of careful police work, and a vital contribution by a concerned elderly citizen, to identify the young woman's body. Erik Winter becomes concerned with what has happened to the red-haired little girl who was seen with the young woman. Winter is a policeman who can't focus on anything else once an investigation gets underway.

One of the interesting features of this story is the feeling of history repeating itself. Twenty five years earlier the young woman was involved in a similar incident when her own mother disappeared. Both mother and daughter leave behind paintings that give clues to the life they've been leading. My guess is that some readers won't realise there are two young voices in the narrative.

My rating: 4.3

I've also read  FROZEN TRACKS

EuroCrime lists the titles available in English in this order
Chief Inspector Erik Winter, Gothenburg, Sweden

• Death Angels	2009	1
• The Shadow Woman	2010	2
• Sun and Shadow	2005	3
• Never End	2006	4
• Frozen Tracks	2007	5
• Sail of Stone	2012	6
• Room No. 10	2013	7

Review: FROZEN TRACKS, Ake Edwardson

Published at Vintage 2008
originally published in Swedish 2007
#3 in the Erik Winter series
English translation by Laurie Thompson
ISBN 978-0-099-47207-0
538 pages
Source: I bought it.

Publisher's blurb
The autumn gloom comes quickly on the Swedish city of Gothenburg, and for Detective Inspector Erik Winter the days seem even shorter, the nights bleaker, when he is faced with two seemingly unrelated sets of perplexing crimes. The investigation of a series of assaults and a string of child abductions take Winter to "the flats," the barren prairies of rural Sweden whose wastelands conceal crimes as sinister as the land itself. Winter must deduce the labyrinthine connections between the cases before it is too late and his own family comes into danger.

My take:

They never worked on one isolated case at a time. That might have been the situation in the best of all worlds, but that wasn't where they were living. In the best of all worlds they wouldn't have existed at all as a profession. In the best of all worlds there was no such thing as CID detectives, no uniformed police officers. Law and order took care of itself. Everybody lived in a land of milk and honey.

In FROZEN TRACKS 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 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?

My rating: 4.4

I'll be counting FROZEN TRACKS as a title in the Nordic Challenge 2011 and also for the letter F in Crime Fiction Alphabet.

Another review to check: Fiona Walker on EuroCrime