The Ice Princess by Camilla Läckberg

Location: Sweden - mostly in Fjällbacka, a seaside village on the west coast of Sweden 150 km/93.2 miles north of Göteborg; Göteborg; and Tanumshede, a little north of Fjällbacka.

This is a European selection for Dorte's 2010 Global Reading Challenge

Below are my reactions to The Ice Princess but I recommend you also read Norman's outstanding review at Crime Scraps

Erica Falck has returned to her family home in Fjällbacka after the death of her parents. She is sorting through the effects and at the same time trying to work on a biography of Selma Lagerlöf, a Swedish author and the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Out walking one day, an elderly man frantically asks her to come into a house where she finds the body of Alexandra (Alex) Carlgren, a childhood friend, dead in the bath, apparently a suicide. She has been dead for several days and, with heat has been off, the water has frozen.

Alex's family ask her to write a memorial article. They do not believe that she killed herself. In the course of interviewing Alex's husband and business partner, Erica becomes interested in what happened to her friend, why they grew apart. She forms the idea of writing a book about Alex and what led her to take her life.

The Forensic Pathologist rules the case a suicide. Erica's involvement gets deeper and more complicated when she finds that a detective assigned to the investigation is another childhood friend, one who had a crush on her.

The style of the Ice Princess appeals to me greatly. It is the same feeling I had reading Susan Hill's The Various Haunts of Men though I wouldn't compare the two books. It is more the way Läckberg creates a sense of place and a feeling for the characters. There are little details, not consequential to the plot, that left a mark as I read. When Erica is driving through Göteborg to meet Alex's husband, she is convinced that every road will take her to Hisingen and, indeed, she ends up there trying leave Göteborg. Having spend most of seven days lost driving through the U.K. last year, it made me smile. There is also the scene where Erica is greeting the town's leading lady and is concerned that she will get the sequence of cheek kissing wrong.

I found the story griping. Läckberg parceled out the revealments in a way that kept me guessing. She gave good clues along the way but I was still surprised at how the case concluded.

Plot, characters, and setting combined to make this one of my favorite reads. The translation by Steven T. Murray, who also translates Henning Mankell, feels natural

As soon as my TBR stack shrink a bit I'll be looking for more of her books.

Here is a web site that describes a bit of the real Fjällbacka: A bookworm's tour of murder in Sweden

Notes: The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson

MacLehose Press (Imprint of Quercus), 2009. Translated from Swedish by Reg Keeland. ISBN 9781847245571, 569 pages

I may be the last hard core crime fiction enthusiast to read The Girl Who Played With Fire (THWPWF) so I am not planning a detailed review and analysis. See below for resources. Instead, I will provide a few notes that occurred to me as I read. There may be spoilers ahead, be warned.

• I liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, detailed family histories and all, but enjoyed TGWPWF more because it has the police procedural element.


• Speaking of procedures, why didn't the police discover that Bjurman had a cabin? Surely they would have dug into his financials.


• Also liked getting the back-story on Salander. Pretty horrible. I wasn't expecting the biggest revelation about her background.


• What else besides Asperger's affects Salander's behavior?


• I wonder if Larsson read Helen Tursten's Detective Inspector Huss? I was struck by the similarities between the sexist detective Jonny Blom in ...Huss and the rabidly sexist Hans Faste in TGWPWF. Jonny gets slapped by female detective Birgitta Moberg and Hans by female detective Sonja Modig.


• I really want to read the third book, The Girl who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. I want Salander to find peace, be friends with Blomkvist again, and take down the remaining people who did her wrong. Quercus will be getting more money from me this Fall.


• I liked to references to Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking which I got from the library so I can understand about Pippi and Kalli.


• Salander hitting upon the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem while sneaking though the woods was a bit much, still fun though.

Maxine considerately collected links about this book including one to her own review here PETRONA: That girl who played with fire
And there are also these sites that have extensive reviews. If I forgot anyone, let me know.
International Crime Noir: Comments on The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson
Material Witness: REVIEW: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
It's Criminal: The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Review: Detective Inspector Huss, Helene Tursten

Soho Press, Inc., 2003. ISBN 1-56947-303-X, 371 pages. Translated by Steven T. Murray. First published in Sweden in 1998.

Detective Inspector Huss is the first of three books featuring Irene Huss of the Violent Crimes Unit in Goteborg, Sweden. Huss is at the scene of an apparent suicide. The body of wealthy financier, Richard von Knecht, hit the sidewalk below his apartment just as his wife and son arrived by car. The Violent Crimes Unit quickly determines that it could not have been a suicide and begin their look for a motive and suspects.

I found this book slow going at first and it took two attempts to finish it. In the end, though, I fond it a satisfying procedural, enough so that I want to read the next two books in the series. In addition to the police work at the core of the story, Tursten works incorporates the sexist treatment of the female detectives in spite of their obvious competence. It will be interesting to see if this continues in subsequent books.

Huss is married to a chef and they have twin daughters. Tursten shows the reader how Huss tries to balance her home and professional lives without letting it take over the story. When one of the twins becomes a skinhead, Tursten uses it to describe the neo-nazi attitudes among young Swedes. This plot line seemed to get wrapped up a bit too neatly and quickly but was still interesting.

Tursten also gives a look at how minority nationalities are treated in Sweden. One of the members of the Unit is Finnish. From the comments directed to and about him you get the impression that there isn't full acceptance of Fins. This is interesting considering that Finnish and a dialect of Finnish are official minority languages in Sweden.

This is a solid police procedural that I enjoyed despite a slow start. I'm not well read in Scandinavian crime fiction but I would think this book would be listed as core reading.

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

I'm not going to write a full on review of this book. It is probably the most written about book appearing in 2008 and is appearing on top ten lists all across the blogosphere. You find excellent reviews and discussions on these blogs. Be sure to read the comments as well.

The Rap sheet and here.

Crime Scraps and again here.

Eurocrime

Mysteries in Paradise

Oh, just do a search in your feed reader on Dragon Tattoo and you'll find an abundance of discussion.

Some of my observations:

I liked the UK cover better but that is usually the case with me.

The first two hundred pages did drag on a bit but I didn't mind too much. I listened to it on my iPod during a long dental procedure and later on a long road trip to Florida. Besides, I like to read Charles Dickens' novels. Bleak House and the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce prepared me.

The character Lisbeth Salander fascinates me and is why I put Dragon Tattoo on my top ten list. Declan Burke, on the other hand, said (here and here) that Salander was looking like the "idealised fantasy of a middle-aged man" and "The Lisbeth character, meanwhile, came on like a goth Modesty Blaise who was simply too good to be true." I don't know about the middle-aged male fantasy bit (yes I do but don't want to admit it) but I don't disagree with the second statement. Of course, I have a weakness for goth and would probably dabble in it if I were a teenager today. And I read Modesty Blaise as a teenager - talk about male fantasies. I also didn't find Salander's technical skills too far off.

I too believe that the original title, Men who Hate Women is more descriptive but probably failed the marketing test in favor of the sexier Dragon Tattoo.

I found it riveting when Blomkvist and Salander's investigations really got going in the last third. It was worth the wait.

I liked enough to order the UK edition of The Girl who Played With Fire and purchased a print copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for reference and probable later re-read.