Blood Song

January 27, 2020
The prologue of Gustawsson’s disappointing third crime thriller featuring profiler Emily Roy and true crime author Alexis Castells (after 2018’s Keeper) suggests that the atrocities of Franco’s Spain will be a prime plot element, as does a scene set in 1937 Spain, but these prove incidental. Instead, the focus is on the stabbing murders of three members of the wealthy Lindbergh family in Falkenberg, Sweden, in 2016. When Aliénor Lindbergh, who’s interning with the Metropolitan Police in London, learns of the deaths of her parents and sister, she returns home to Sweden, accompanied by her friend Emily, who was teaching her criminal profiling. There Alexis joins Emily in investigating the killings. The search for answers leads the pair to look for a connection to a fertility clinic operated by Aliénor’s parents that boasted an improbable success rate. Readers should be prepared for stock characters and predictable plot twists, as well as distracting flashbacks that promise more than they deliver. Crime fiction fans can safely pass on this one. Agent: Yolande Rochet de la Valee, Bragelonne (France).

February 15, 2020
When a Swedish recruit working for Scotland Yard learns that her rich and prominent family has been murdered, she cannot imagine that events from different decades and countries will come into play during the investigation. During Franco's brutal regime in Spain of the 1930s, women were imprisoned, raped, and forced to give up their children. In the Spanish orphanages of the following decades, a group of young girls banded together as best as they could against the abuse of the adults in charge. But Aliénor Lindbergh, a Scotland Yard recruit, knows none of this, or how it might affect her, when she hears the news about her family in 2016. She returns to Sweden with Yard profiler Emily Roy and true-crime writer Alexis Castells, and soon the search for answers goes in myriad directions. The Lindberghs ran a fertility clinic, and unsettling rumors about their practices are rife; meanwhile, Alexis is supposed to be planning a wedding--will it be able to proceed? The author of this series (Keeper, 2017, etc.) frequently assumes that readers have read the earlier novels; several references to partnerships, etc., are uncertain to new readers, and even the author's talent for creating vivid characters gets lost in this convoluted tale. Readers new to this series will find it hard to get engaged in the coincidence-laden story.

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