The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules

July 18, 2016
In Ingelman-Sundberg's winning seriocomic series debut, 79-year-old Martha Andersson gets fed up with her treatment at the Diamond House retirement home, starting with its bad food and restrictions. Martha decides to do something about her situation by enlisting a number of her geriatric friends, including 79-year-old Oscar "Brains" Krupp, in becoming "the most troublesome oldies in the world." They form the League of Pensioners and embark on a series of escapades that begins with a kitchen raid and grows progressively bolder to include a bank robbery. The OAPs (old age pensioners) prove both adept and inept in ways that are both charming and surprising as they pull off the theft of paintings by Renoir and Monet from Stockholm's National Museum, and then have to deal with the consequences. Readers will pull for the unlikely gang in their efforts to commit the "ultimate crime" toward the end of this appealing crime novel.

May 1, 2016
Could prison really be worse than a retirement home? Five senior citizens plan the perfect crime to find out. Martha Andersson has had it with the prisonlike atmosphere at Diamond House Retirement Home. Bad food, limited coffee, and no exercise spell trouble for this spry old woman. With the help of a generous supply of cloudberry liqueur, she recruits her friends into forming The League of Pensioners, bent on committing a crime worthy of incarceration. Perhaps most helpful for Martha's purposes: nurse Barbara, the ambitious manager of Diamond House. Barbara has her romantic sights set on Ingmar Mattson, the penny-pinching director of the retirement home, and her eagerness to please him leads to the economizing that pushes Martha and her cronies toward a life of crime in the first place--but when Ingmar sweeps Barbara away, it leaves Martha and her cronies the perfect opportunity to misbehave. Brains sorts out the technical details, while Rake and Christina act as henchmen, and Anna-Greta foots much of the bill. Their victimless jewel and art heists, however, soon implode under a series of unexpected obstacles. Instead of hyperbolic, mustache-twirling villains, Ingelman-Sundberg (The Little Lady Who Struck Lucky Again, 2015, etc.) deftly orchestrates the twists and turns in the plot through the foibles of real life, including an overly zealous housekeeper, a vaguely menacing convict, a lazy pair of crewmen, and police officers whose ageism blinds them to the clues right under their noses. Once caught, the pensioners quickly learn much from their fellow inmates--the next crime will certainly come off without a hitch. The first of the League of Pensioners series translated from the Swedish, Ingelman-Sundberg's tale captures the rebelliousness percolating just under the surface of ignored, shuffled away elderly folks, although the simplistic prose sounds a bit paternalistic at times. A merry, lighthearted caper.

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May 1, 2016
Swedish writers may be known for their crime novels, but Ingelman-Sundberg's caper involves illegal activity of a rather unusual order. Driving the novel's narrative is 79-year-old Martha Andersson, who lives in a retirement home but is hardly the retiring type. Tired of rigid rules and too-early bedtimes, and up to her dentures in bland, overcooked food, the feisty septuagenarian corrals her four closest friendsBrains, Rake, Christina, and Anna-Gretaand sets out to spice up the quality of her humdrum senior life. The initial plan is to rob the safe of a luxury hotel, but matters soon escalate, and the fearsome foursome finds themselves entangled in the heist of a Monet and a Renoir from the National Museum. Ingelman-Sundberg (The Little Old Lady Who Struck Lucky Again, 2015) tells her tale from multiple viewpoints and gives great attention to detail. Though a bit long-winded at times, this good-natured outing will appeal to readers interested in a story about spirited seniors determined to have fun, raise some hell, and cause more than a little menace during their so-called mature years.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)