The Nightmare

May 14, 2012
Joona Linna looks into two bizarre deaths in Kepler’s complex second novel featuring the Stockholm detective inspector (after 2011’s The Hypnotist). Carl Palmcrona, the general director of the National Inspectorate of Strategic Products, which oversees military exports, is found hanged in an empty room in his house, while the Coast Guard discovers Penelope Fernandez drowned on a drifting motorboat in dry clothes. Linna senses there’s more to both deaths than meets the eye, especially after Penelope’s peace activist sister—who wasn’t one to keep her views on Sweden’s arms export business to places like Sudan a secret—goes missing. With the possible terrorist angle to consider, Linna must vie for control of the case with Säpo, the Swedish Security Service, and reluctantly joins forces with a 25-year-old female Säpo inspector. Fans of slow-burning Scandinavian crime fiction with troubled heroes will feel right at home with Kepler, the pseudonym of a Swedish literary couple. Agent: Jonas Axelsson, Bonnier Group Agency.

October 29, 2012
Scandinavian sleuth Joona Linna of the National Homicide Squad has a way with odd murder cases, and in Kepler’s latest, he faces two real puzzlers. A young woman is found dead on a deserted yacht, her lungs full of water, but her body and clothes dry as a bone. The following day, a government official is discovered in his Stockholm apartment hanging from a high rafter, an apparent suicide—except there is no furniture in the room on which he could have made his fatal climb. Narrator Mark Bramhall smoothly handles tongue-twisting Nordic names, and sets a pace that allows the listener to properly process the often-perplexing events without diminishing their chilling effect. He also provides a variety of appropriate voices for a large cast that includes a surprisingly emotional antiterrorist expert, a frightened young peace activist on the run from an unstoppable assassin, and the evil mastermind behind the deaths. An FSG/Sarah Crichton hardcover.