Finished
Kristina Ohlsson's
Hostage, 4th in her Fredrika Bergman, Intrepid Reluctant Swedish Crime Analyst Investigator series of police procedurals that seem to have evolved into intelligence services thrillers. This is actually a pretty drastic shift in tone and setting from the previous books in the series, which I bought long ago on sale and finally got around to reading last week and liked enough to go and get #4 from the library once the weather cleared up enough for a walk.
The premise of this one is that the titular hostage situation occurs on a Swedish plane flying into US airspace, under threat of blowing up due to a planted bomb unless the pilots follow some mysterious plotters' instructions and give in to certain political demands. Accordingly Bergman, newly returned from a hiatus overseas, her former boss in the police special investigative unit Alex Recht, who has since gone to work for the Swedish intelligence services instead, and a new investigative team from said services, must track down means and motivations to try to neutralize and/or find leverage on the culprits before it lands or crashes. And just for added drama, the US alphabet agencies get involved, with the threat of shooting down a plane full of civilians if they don't do it in time, which is actually the hook in the novel's prologue.
There's an afterword in the back of the book which says that Ohlsson, who herself is some kind of counter-terrorism security analyst according to her bio-blurb, wanted to write this in the wake of some terrorist attacks in Stockholm. And it's pretty much Art Imitates Life in that you can see how it was probably cathartic for her to write something where her regular investigative heroes could solve a problem having to do with her day job.
Unfortunately, it seems to suffer a bit from being too close to home, both in terms of the author's apparent closeness to the subject matter, as well as certain characters' supporting cast's overly-coincidental feeling involvement. Admittedly it's been a few years since the 3rd book, but the last time we heard about that particular peripheral character, they were portrayed as an aimless slacker layabout, and now they've suddenly gained purpose and direction enough to become a key player in the unfolding drama. It feels rather contrived, having the effect IMHO of lowering the stakes rather than upping them as was probably intended to by the increased personal connection and incentive to make sure everything comes out alright.
Similarly, another overly-coincidental seeming revelation about the positioning of a different character to tackle certain matters just feels like more contrived writing as extra assurance that things could turn out okay via intervention rather than the main team being able to handle things. Personally, I think it would have been more interesting if the hypothetical worst situation they were trying to avert did play out (or that the save came from another more difficult direction that was hinted at as being possible, rather than the easy one that was set up), but then that would have made it an entirely different sort of series due to the ensuing political fallout.
Even allowing for the fact that I'm not really into thrillers (the more pulse-pounding they try to present themselves, the more of a snoozefest I seem to find them; I stayed up to finish reading the 2nd novel in this series, but took a nap break in the middle of this one because I'd just stopped caring what happens since I was pretty sure it was going to turn out okay, maybe less a dramatic death or two), this was kind of disappointing compared to the other books in the series. That said, it did introduce some new career possibilities for characters whom I'd grown to like, whom it was nice to see more of, and introduce some interesting new potential recurring cast members. Interestingly enough, it rather deglamourizes Säpo by making Swedish intelligence seem a lot more boring and somewhat less competent than the other Swedish espionage-adjacent thrillers I've read, which may or may not be a case of Writing What You Know.
Medium recommendation for the other books in the series. #1 is a pretty standard psycho abductor sort of case (though I give props for the novelty value of providing certain suspects with alibis for one crime by the dubious virtue of their having been too busy committing another crime to do the first crime), but the next couple of books are actually pretty good with interesting cases (and won one Swedish crime award each), with #2 weaving bits about refugee smuggling and Swedish anti-immigrant sentiments into a very twisty and challenging investigation, and #3 upping the challenge with a mystery in the past having bearing on a revisited recent unsolved disappearance in the present day, in a fairly novel fashion.
I rather liked the second 2 books, although the author does suffer from an annoying tendency to regularly add fake-out emotional relationship drama twists to the already on-going investigative twists, in way that feels a lot like crying wolf. Which is something which IMHO works a lot better when it at least looks whatever it was could have been reasonably mistaken for a vaguely wolf-shaped shadow puppet if you tilted your head and squinted a bit, rather than what amounts to a presentation of “ahahaha… oops, that was Deformed Rabbit all along, sorry not sorry for the scare (again)”. Especially if you do it more than once per novel.
