Summer Death

Starred review from April 22, 2013
A steaming hot Swedish summer provides the backdrop for Kallentoft’s gritty second thriller featuring Linköping Det. Insp. Malin Fors (after 2012’s Midwinter Blood). While swimming at her health club, Malin receives a call from a colleague to come to a crime scene at the city’s Horticultural Society Park, where a naked blond girl in her early teens has been found. Evidently a rape victim, the girl has no memory of what happened to her. When a psychopath later kills another girl, also in her early teens, Malin, who likens herself to Batman (“Damaged goods, yet trying to watch over something”), strives all the more to engage with those who suffer from these terrible crimes. Meanwhile, the detective is sick with worry for her 14-year-old daughter, Tove, and still grieves over the love she and her former husband, Janne, tossed away. As she rants against “bloody mediatocracy... the rapturous elevation of the mediocre,” Malin struggles to preserve her integrity in this utterly convincing indictment of today’s soul-consuming celebrity culture.

May 1, 2013

In the second entry in Kallentoft's series (after Midwinter Blood), Swedish DI Malin Fors is anxious to sink her teeth into a difficult case. Sweden is experiencing a heat wave and crime seems to have slowed, but Fors soon gets what she wants: sexual abuses, tortures, animal killings, murders, and an unknown serial criminal. Unfortunately, she also endangers her teenage daughter as the result of a press-conference statement. The weather slows down the investigation but also contributes to the solution. VERDICT Voices from the victims, whether dead or alive, are confusing at first, and some readers may find that this interferes with the procedural aspect of things. This is a male author writing from the perspective of a female character and, at times, Fors's voice does not feel right. However, Kallentoft has written a page-turner that is not for the faint of heart. Crime fiction fans and those who enjoy the works of Stieg Larsson and Hakan Nesser might want to try this title.--Frances Thorsen, Chronicles of Crime Bookshop, Victoria, BC

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