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Old 05-12-2017, 12:44 PM   #617
ATDrake
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Bargain @ £0.99 each from Simon & Schuster UK as part of a Kobo UK special promotion until May 18th (only #2 & #5 seem to be matched at Amazon UK thus far, though that will probably change):

5 novels in the Fredrika Bergman & Alex Recht series (entire series thus far) by Swedish author Kristina Ohlsson (SYKM, Wikipedia SV), starring an investigative analyst and a police superintendent in Stockholm.

I bought the first 3 of these when they were on sale years ago, and have read all 5, and I'd say that while not among the top tier of Scandicrime offerings, they're reasonably good and #2-3 are actually quite enjoyable with clever cases and unusual motives and twist revelations, which make some use of Swedish culture and social issues (and they each won one of the Swedish literary crime awards).

#1 OTOH, is a fairly standard “psycho with unresolved issues lashing out against the world” case which was written decently enough but not particularly distinguished (aside from an entertaining bit where suspects turned out to be cleared of one crime because it turned out they were guilty of committing another at the same time), and #4-5 shift the series into counter-terrorism thriller plots which for me personally, were not as entertaining (but then I'm not into thrillers; YMMV). The author does have a couple of repeated writing tics which you may or may not find annoying, though.

Anyway, at this low price, they're certainly worth giving a try if you think you might like them, and I'll be picking up the fills I'm missing from my earlier purchases. Some of the stories refer to significant happenings from previous cases, and there's an ongoing personal situation development in the background of the series, so it's probably better not to read standalone. Although the actual cases are reasonably self-contained and IIRC don't spoiler the actual whodunnits for previous ones even if they give a few details on how the cases turned out, and there's a timejump split at the #4 mark so you could start there if you strongly prefer counter-terrorism thrillers to serial killer hunting.
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