This is my 3rd book in the Patrick Hedstorm series, and the worst among rhose.A very insipid tale told of young women found dead or missing in the 70s as well as in 2004... and connection sought for these different timelines of crimes. The side story of Erica, Patrick's pregnant partner and her sister Anne who is forever attracting the wrong kind of man, too wasn't thAt convincing. Would continue with the series as I have invested in the private lives of the investigators and their respective families.

A great detective story from the Queen of Nordic noir, translated from Swedish. The author has also been called Swedens Agatha Christie. The book is free-standing but its #2 in her 10-volume series featuring detective Patrick Hedstrom.The focus is on a crazy feuding family, descendants of a now-deceased charismatic preacher who passed his healing ability on to his two sons. The members of the family range from a wealthy accountant living on a big estate to trailer trash a morbidly obese woman with two 30-ish sons who live at home and live by robbing empty vacation cottages. She spends all her time rearranging photo albums from the days when she was a beauty queen. The blurbs call them a feuding clan of misfits, religious fanatics and criminals. OK, that fits. The immediate mystery is that the body of a young missing woman is found in a gorge in a scenic tourist area dumped off a cliff. Beneath that body are two skeletons of young women missing from twenty-four years ago. The new body has been tortured and killed in the same gruesome manner as the old bodies. A fourth woman has just gone missing. The plot proceeds with a lot of focus on the personal lives of the detectives as well as on the family members suspected in the recent disappearances just as they were suspected twenty years ago. (It helped me at first to make a genealogy chart to keep track of all the family connections.) The lead detective has a lot going on at home with his wife pregnant with their first child. The female detective on the team is subject to disrespect by some of the older men. We have a burned-out, lazy, know-it-all detective as well as an alcoholic. We are spared graphic details of the victims sexual abuse and torture but are given short entries of the womens thoughts almost as if they had kept diaries. We are treated to a tightly-knit, plausible and complex plot. When an exhumation of a grave is ordered for DNA testing, we get three surprises fed to us one at a time as various results come in.We also get local color of Sweden in and around Fjallbacka, a small coastal tourist resort on Swedens western coast. This is the actual town where the author grew up. All in all, a good and enjoyable detective read. photos of Fjallbacka: top from kevinandamanda.com; bottom from AFAR.comphoto of the author from book jacket and from carinteriordesigns.net

This is the second book in this series by Swedish author Camilla Läckberg. She seems to be one of those love her or hate her authors as her ratings veer between one and five stars at random! Nevertheless I enjoyed this offering as much as the first book The Ice Princess. Our main characters, Patrik and Erica, are back and this time it is Patrik's turn to take centre stage as Erica sits at home heavily pregnant during a heat wave. I felt for her! The story was excellent although I got a little lost at times regarding who was who and what their relationships were. There were a lot of characters and they were all related! The book also jumped around a lot from one person's perspective to another and occasionally I was forced to read back and work things out. This was a small price to pay though for a really entertaining story and a satisfactory conclusion to the mystery.