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Finished the first completed read of the new year (technically, it was half-started before that, but only about 50% through): Denise Rudberg's A Small Indiscretion, which appears to be the 1st in her Marianne Jidhoff series of Stockholm-set crime novels starring a widow returning to the workforce as the secretary for a prosecutor. This was an AmazonCrossing translation title I bought when it was on sale last year, and the bio-blurb for the author says that she was known as the "Queen of Swedish Chick-Lit" before she turned her hand to writing mysteries as well.
With that in mind, I was kind of expecting a lighter, fluffier tone to this than the rather darker and gloomier mood that seems to be the trend in most "Nordic Noir" novels, but it seemed actually pretty standard in approach, with perhaps the chick-lit elements coming in with the greater incorporation of class divides depicted via assorted behaviour in social circles and relative fashionability and such. And there was something of an emphasis on failed marriages and infidelity dramas, but that might have simply because they provided fodder for the criminal motivation.
Anyway, this set up an interesting intertwining drama that mixed both the actual casework as well as the returning-to-the-workforce office politics and personal complications in the lives of all the leads, with four sets of shifting POVs between the middle-aged Marianne who's returning to the workforce after taking a year off to care for her deceased husband whose inadvertent deathbed confession involved revealing that he'd been cheating on her and encounters hostilities from her replacement co-workers, divorced policeman Torsten who apparently works for her boss' office and will be reporting to her in between juggling a teenaged son and getting used to a new police partner who investigates a fatal hit-and-run, a lonely and dissatisfied suburban housewife who's the apparent victim of a stalker her husband doesn't believe exists, and the apparent stalker with an unknown but disturbing agenda.
While this sounds like it could get overly-complicated, actually all the story threads were delineated quite clearly, with each POV dealing with a particular aspect of the central case and keeping them quite separate apart from the bits where they would naturally overlap, as characters intersected by calling each other for help (or just to leave creepy messages), but otherwise having their own fully-developed activities and inner lives to return to.
The effect when reading was of a neatly laid-out web that didn't really need to be untangled, just followed to the centre as the plot points began to hook up more and more. This was also pretty strong on character development, which seemed to be done with a good deal of depth for many of the individuals involved, and gave the impression that their lives would be continuing into the next novels (and didn't wrap up at the end of this one, with some clear "to be continued" hints at the end).
Medium recommend if you think you might be interested. The setup and setting seem a little unusual for typical Scandinavian crime subgenre, with more social and personal and background cultural stuff incorporated into it than seems to usually be the case, but not overly so, adding up to a nifty peek into Swedish society. And the story is unfolded rather neatly, even if the wrap-up and explanation feels slightly rushed and sketchy in relation to the slow set-up of whodunnit. I ended up liking this a bit more than I thought I might, and I'm interested enough to buy further installments if AmazonCrossing translates them (and for that matter, Rudberg's "Swedish Chick-Lit", just to see what it looks like).
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