Eighteen Below

July 1, 2018

In this third entry in the Fabian Risk series from screenwriter Ahnhem (who's adapted Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander books), police track a wealthy young techie entrepreneur's car as it races through the Swedish city of Helsingborg and crashes into the Öresund strait. Surprisingly, an autopsy reveals that the techie was murdered two months previously, with his body frozen at 18° below zero. But why?

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October 1, 2018
The third appearance for Swedish cop Fabian Risk and his colleagues in Helsingborg's crime squad (The Ninth Grave, 2017, etc.) presents them two very different crime waves, one that might have been ripped from the headlines, the other more baroque, fantastic, and transcendentally evil.Astrid Tuvesson, the problem drinker who heads the squad, gets off to a bad start when her car is clipped by a BMW that takes off at high speed and her pursuit of it ends when it drives off a quay into the harbor below. Things get worse when pathologist Einar "Braids" Greide announces that Peter Brise, the celebrated video game designer pulled from the water, actually froze to death two months ago. Since plenty of people have seen Brise quite recently, that means something's seriously wrong, and that something turns out to be a long-unsuspected case of identity theft on a grand scale. While the crime squad is turning over every stone looking for the man who carefully selects wealthy targets, imprisons them in chest freezers until they're dead, impersonates them with a master's improbable hand, and drains their assets, uniformed officer Dunja Hougaard, recently arrived from Copenhagen, runs into an unrelated and much more horrifyingly realistic series of crimes by a masked crew of thrill killers who beat and kick random street people to death just for fun. Since Kim Sleizner, Dunja's abusive boss back in Copenhagen, continues to do everything he can to torpedo her investigation, she persuades mate Magnus Rawn to join her outside official regulations to catch the killers. But it's the coldhearted virtuoso whose remorseless planning stands in such striking opposition to the thrill killers that will haunt your memory long after you've finished reading.Hats off to Ahnhem for creating a villain more powerful than the franchise team charged with bringing him in.

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Starred review from October 8, 2018
In Ahnhem’s intricately plotted third Fabian Risk novel (after 2017’s Ninth Grave), police detective Risk is struggling with his deteriorating marriage and his troubled teenage son, Theodor, when he and other members of the Helsingborg crime squad, led by Astrid Tuvesson, become involved in a bizarre case. Wealthy IT magnate Peter Brise appears to have died in a car crash, but forensic evidence proves that Brise died two months earlier. As the bodies of other wealthy people pile up, Risk and his fellow officers realize that serial killers are stealing the identities of their victims. Meanwhile, Risk’s Danish police counterpart, Dunja Hougaard, is stuck in out-of-the-way Zealand, where she’s tracking a ring of disaffected teens known as “happy slappers” who randomly assault people—and Theodor is involved with them. Readers will sympathize with Risk, a decent man caught between the demands of his family and his job, and such well-drawn supporting characters as Tuvesson, who’s sinking into alcoholism. Ahnhem unflinchingly unveils the monstrous crimes lurking beneath Scandinavia’s seemingly placid surface.

November 1, 2018
This third book in the internationally best-selling Fabian Risk series (following The Ninth Grave, 2017) opens, unusually for Scandinavian noir, on a hot summer's day in Sweden. Fans of the genre know, however, that no amount of sunshine can brighten a dark landscape of crime, and who needs snow when you have several deep freezer chests to keep the chill going? Risk is dealing with considerable trauma within his own family while investigating a most ingenious spin on the crime of identity theft. On a parallel track is the appalling practice of happy slapping by teenagers who randomly attack homeless victims, record the crimes on their phones, and share them on the darknet. The two investigations slowly come together in one shocking climax, which resolves most of the issues while introducing a whole new set of questions. The cliff-hanger ending points to a follow-up, although the series was originally marketed as a trilogy. A highly skilled piece of storytelling recommended for those who can't get enough Lars Kepler and Jo Nesb�.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)