Perduta (Piemme linea rossa) (2011 original; edició 2013)

A dog finds a dead body: a young woman cut into two big pieces, but missing her head and hands. It becomes clear that the story is about finding out who made a snuff film and whether the film is even real. The story line was well structured with flashes forward to transcripts from an internal affairs investigation into how things went so horribly wrong keep the momentum going. A real page turner. ( )

A solid Scandinavian police procedural, set in urban, modern Sweden, ‘The Disappeared’ is not your typical melancholic Nordic noir. The writing is plain and accessible; the style is matter of fact and occasionally straightforward to the point of being clumsy. But the author has constructed an intriguing mystery, one which successfully kept me involved throughout the lengthy story.

It features a densely-woven murder mystery spanning several decades, with the core plot enhanced by the ongoing and convoluted private lives of the investigating team of detectives. Where the previous book had been overwhelmed by (to me) tedious details about mundane failing marriages and personal pregnancy angst, here the back-story is usefully employed to add heft to the puzzle and meaning of the mystery. It helps that the author uses a nifty device – a subsequent investigation of the investigation – to chop up the timeline and ratchet up the tension.

Here, the plot follows an investigation into a newly-discovered body of a young woman who died a couple of years ago, but it rapidly expands to draw in a bewildering array of different characters; a famous author convicted of killing her husband who hasn’t spoken since; a university professor accused of raping a student; a young lad with every motive for the recent murder… but who is hard to connect to the older bodies which soon follow the girl’s out of the ground. It’s a complicated tale but one which makes satisfying sense when you reach the conclusion.

My only real criticism is that too many of the detectives become embroiled in the case on a personal basis. There are two staggeringly huge coincidences which defy the laws of nature – and, sure, they ramp up the drama, but just one of them would have been hard to swallow.
There's more comments on the plot and characters over at
https://murdermayhemandmore.wordpress.com/2015/03/23/the-disappeared-substantial...

Solid, but not astonishing. A good book to get engrossed in at an airport lounge which will last a long-haul flight.
7/10 ( )

When the body of a woman is found buried in the woods, newly bereaved Alex Recht from the Stockholm police believes it to be that of long missing student, Rebecca Trolle. Soon more bodies are found buried in the grave, but years apart. Inspector Alex Recht, Fredrika Bergman, and Peter Rydh discover that at the time of Rebecca’s death, she was obsessed with the topic of her dissertation, a former beloved children’s book author who went to prison for murdering her ex-husband. Rebecca was convinced of the author’s innocence and may have stumbled upon information proving her theory.

The novel is the third in a series featuring Fredrika Bergman and her fellow investigators as they attempt to solve the case, which develops into serial murders. Personal conflicts among the police personnel arise, complicating the investigation. The author delivers fragments of a backstory and brief glimpses of each character’s life. The characters are dark, disturbing, and fascinating. There’s an elderly children’s author who hasn’t uttered a word in decades, a former boyfriend with a troubling obsession, and a web of mystery that includes sexual assault charges, pornography and snuff films.

This was a suspenseful novel, even though it could easily have been edited to be flow a little faster. It created a great mix of psychology, urban myths and police procedure with a sense of the thriller at the end. I've enjoyed all three of the books in the series and look forward to the next one which is scheduled to come out this year.
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I very much like Swedish crime/mystery books. This is the first I've read by the author. It is the third in the series, and while I haven't read the previous two, the plot and characters were easy to follow.

When a young woman missing for two years is discovered dismembered in a shallow grave, the detectives try to piece together a motive, and find who performed this grisly murder. Fredrika Bergman returns to the team after taking maternity leave. She jumps right into the many twists and turns of the case, and is perplexed when one of the persons of interest happens to be the father of her child.

When a second body is discovered that was previously missing for thirty years, the team scrambles to find a link between the cases.

I'll rate this book 2.5 out of 5. It was worth the read, but did not hold my interest enough to read more in the series..

I think I need to take a break from mystery...three in three days is making my head spin. But Ohlsson is making serious strides in her technique as she goes from #1 to #3 in her Bergman and Recht series: she is now able to hold several lines of plot in suspense simultaneously without any of them collapsing into
inevitability. I suppose it helps that she now has a body of work that she can use to create parallels. The weakest sections are still those where she needs to go back over plot from her previous texts. All of the characters hit new levels of "stressed outedness" in The Disappeared. Hopefully Ohlsson uses more creative vocabulary in Swedish for what comes to be translated as "stressed" in English; the word is used too frequently. ( )