Next up was a book which seems to be the “cool” thing to be reading at the moment, give or take a year - I’m a bit late to the party. I’d been recommended this book by a wide variety of people, and it appeared to fall into my broad interests as a crime/murder mystery so it wasn’t really difficult choosing it as the second book to read.

I really liked it. It was hard to get into at first, the start is.. tough going. Lots of intricate details of Swedish politics, corporate infighting and setting the backstory, but with not very much apparent connection to what you go into the book expecting to be the main plot. Then suddenly out of nowhere, everything gets interesting. The political, whistleblower drama suddenly becomes a locked room mystery, where the room is an island. From that point on I was hooked. 

My only criticism was that it all felt a bit clinical, I didn’t find myself getting completely drawn into the world in the book - I was just enjoying reading a story from the outside. I wonder if perhaps this is a side effect of the language as a translation, if only I could read Swedish and then I might know. A lot of the time the language felt functional rather than crafted? This all sounds incredibly pretentious and like I know what I’m talking about. I don’t.

All in all a cracking story, the big reveal was interesting and it’s bitten me to the extent I’m now 100 pages into the second in the series. I’ll report back when I’m done.

5/5