KJELL ERIKSSON – The Cruel Stars of the Night. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, May 2007; trade paperback, April 2008. Translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg.

   Inspector Ann Lindell and her team at the Violent Crimes Division of the Uppsala Police struggle through much of this novel in an attempt to make sense of the murders of several elderly men, looking for connections that would link the murders in some rational fashion.

   In an initially apparently unrelated event, an elderly professor, the father of spinster Laura Hindersen, disappears. “He was a pain,” is the comment offered by a former colleague, and that rather general lack of interest and the absence of clues lead the investigator, Detective Sergeant Asa Lantz-Andersson, to conclude that she will have to wait for some unforeseen event that will resolve the stalled case.

   The novel is, for much of its length, a meticulously plotted procedural. In the final pages, it’s the characters and not the plot that dictate the genre-bending conclusion, undoubtedly less reassuring than the conventional wrap-up but intellectually more challenging and disturbing.

   And it’s that aspect of Eriksson’s artfulness that interests me and makes me eager to return to his work.

The Ann Lindell series —

    1. The Princess of Burundi (2006)

    2. The Cruel Stars of the Night (2007)
    3. The Demon from Dakar (2008)