Last Will

February 13, 2012
Near the start of Marklund’s uneven second Annika Bengtzon thriller made available to U.S. readers (after 2011’s Red Wolf), crime journalist Bengtzon, far from her usual beat, witnesses a crime while covering the annual Nobel Prize dinner in Stockholm’s city hall: a female assassin known as “the Kitten” fires a silenced handgun at two guests on the dance floor, killing Caroline von Behring, the chair of the Karolinska Institute’s Nobel committee. As a witness to the shooting, Bengtzon is saddled with a disclosure ban by the enigmatic Detective Inspector Q, effectively muzzling her reporting efforts. When her newspaper puts her on paid leave, Bengtzon begins her own investigation at the Karolinska Institute, a leading biomedical university. Von Behring isn’t the only prominent scientist to die, and Bengtzon follows a trail leading to Alfred Nobel, the founder of the storied prize. Despite an intriguing premise, Marklund overstuffs her plot and buries any suspense under scientific minutiae. Agent: Niclas Salomonsson, the Salomonsson Agency.