Easy Money

Starred review from September 5, 2011
In the searing debut of Swedish criminal defense attorney Lapidus, three lost souls converge along cocaine’s nightmare highway to hell. Fearsome Serbian Mrado, a collector/dealer/hit man for Yugo crime boss Radovan Kranjic, yearns for more visitation rights with his little daughter, Lovisa. Lower-middle-class JW, tormented by the disappearance of his sister, Camilla, uses coke to ingratiate himself with Stockholm’s moneyed flaming youth. Meanwhile, Chilean prison escapee Jorge Salinas Barrio, a walking coke encyclopedia, wants revenge on Mrado and Radovan for sending him up, but he’s also protecting his sister, Paola. Lapidus counterpoints the trio’s individual pursuits of wealth, power, and human dignity with scraps of court testimony, confidential police memos, and newspaper accounts of police offensives against organized crime. This sprawling novel, full of offensive language, exposes moral degradation of every stripe while relentlessly depicting Sweden’s underworld and the reasons it exists and grows. Author tour.

November 1, 2011
Three small-timers claw their way to the top of Stockholm's vast cocaine empire, with predictably mixed results. Chilean drug dealer Jorge Salinas Barrio sees no reason why he should serve out his jail time. Mrado Slovovic, the Yugoslavian chief of the city's coat-check protection racket, is hungry for bigger things. Johan Westlund, an impoverished party boy, is plucked from obscurity by Abdulkarim Haij, who thinks he can sell drugs to his better-heeled friends. Once Jorge breaks out of prison, the places he and the other two ill-assorted heroes assume in crime boss Radovan Kranjic's establishment change their dreams into ceaseless scheming. Since extortion, prostitution, drug smuggling and money laundering are something of a zero-sum game, each player can reach the top only by bringing down someone else. And even before Jorge, Mrado and JW become aware of each others' existence, that's exactly what they attempt. There are complications, of course. Mrado keeps fighting his ex-wife's attempts to deny his joint custody of their daughter. The higher JW rises in the hierarchy, the more intently he searches for clues to the disappearance of his sister Camilla four years ago. Jorge, saved from death by JW's offhanded intervention, swears eternal loyalty to him, even though eternal loyalty is unlikely to be rewarded. The rat-a-tat-tat rhythms of Lapidus' prose, in Ahlander's translation, aren't for everyone. Yet the first-time novelist, an attorney who's defended some of the most notorious figures in Sweden's underworld, creates a magnetically rich, murky man's world in which women are mostly chattel, the police remain mostly offstage and nothing is ever personal, just business. Inevitably, however, it's their personal ties and quests that most endanger Jorge, Mrado and JW. The closest models for this sprawling, ambitious debut are gangster movies from Scarface to Mesrine.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 1, 2011

A best seller in Sweden, this debut novel--the first in a trilogy--from defense attorney Lapidus follows three criminals in Stockholm's drug underworld. College student JW subsidizes evenings in posh clubs by driving an illegal taxi. Looking for a bigger payoff, he starts selling cocaine. Chilean immigrant Jorge is in prison after taking the fall for a Yugoslav gangster. He escapes, but family obligations and thoughts of revenge keep him in the city. Mrado is the Slavic mafioso's henchman, a tough guy who's also a doting dad. These parallel stories take time to develop, but when they intersect the action erupts in high-octane cinematic grandeur (the book inspired a hit Swedish movie, with a Hollywood remake in development). VERDICT The violence and slow-building plot are reminiscent of Stieg Larsson and the duo of Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom (Three Seconds), but Lepidus clearly fashions his unsavory protagonists and slangy staccato prose after James Ellroy (who provides a glowing blurb). Accordingly, this latest Swedish import will connect best with those who prefer the grit of noir or street lit. [Three-city tour.]--Annabelle Mortensen, Skokie P.L., IL

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2012
Jorge is a drug dealer who has escaped prison and is on the runfrom both police and Mrado, a Serbian enforcer for a Swedish mob. JW is an impoverished twentysomething from a small town in Sweden, trying to fit in with Stockholm's trendiest nightclubbers. He turns to dealing cocaine for cash and acceptance. The characters' actions ensure that they will collide, even as police crack down on organized crime and the city's crime kingpins maneuver for advantage over their rivals. None of the characters is especially engaging on his own, but Lapidus supplies rich backstories that relate to contemporary Swedish malaise over immigrants, organized crime, and drugs. Jorge, whose mother emigrated from Chile, is self-aggrandizing and aggrieved at Swedishness. Bright-but-callow JW is awed by nightclub culture. Mrado learned his trade in the Bosnian War, feels dissed by his boss, and longs to spend more time with his young daughter. Published in Sweden in 2006, Easy Money was a hit, and Lapidus was compared to James Ellroy and Dennis Lehane. It's not that good, but with Scandinavian crime fiction still burning white hot, it will get attention.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)