Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Iceland, 1956. Fifteen-year-old Lára spends the summer working for a couple on the small island of Videy, just off the coast of Reykjavík. In early August, the girl disappears without a trace. The mystery becomes Iceland's greatest unsolved case. What happened to the young girl? Is she still alive? Did she leave the island, or did something happen to her there? Thirty years later in August, 1986, as the city of Reykjavík celebrates its 200th anniversary, journalist Valur Robertsson begins his own investigation into Lara's case.

July 2007. A letter arrives on Inspector Barbarotti’s doorstep detailing a murder that is about to take place in his quiet Swedish town. By the time the police track down the subject of the letter, he is already dead. So when a second letter arrives, then a third, and a fourth, it’s a game of cat and mouse to stop the killer before he can make good on all of his promises.

The Bucket List starts when undercover FBI Agent John Adderley wakes up in a hospital bed in Baltimore with extensive gunshot wounds. He knows he’s lucky to be alive. And just a few beds away is the man who 24 hours ago pointed a gun to his head. Soon, a high-profile cold-case file is sent to Agent Adderley, now living in Sweden (where he’s not lived since he was a boy) in witness protection, hiding until he can testify against the drug cartel he infiltrated back in the States. Adderley is determined to solve the case, even with a price on his head....

On the eve of their thirtieth birthday, twins Jasmine and Nicolas Moretti celebrate late into the night. But when Nicolas wakes several hazy hours later, Jasmine is dead—and he is covered in her blood. Panicking, he takes the murder weapon and runs into the cold Stockholm night. For the police, it’s an open-and-shut case. Nicolas is guilty. And given that he remembers so little of what happened that night, even he isn’t convinced of his innocence.

When a boy leaps to his death from a bridge in the northern town of Umeå, Sweden, police discover drugs scattered in the snow near his body. The town has seen a dramatic increase in narcotic use among its youth, but nobody knows where the pills are coming from.

In an orphanage outside Oslo, twelve-year-old Olav is causing havoc. The institution's ageing director, Agnes Vestavik, sees sheer hatred in the boy's eyes. When Vestavik is found murdered at her desk, stabbed in the neck with a kitchen knife – with Olav nowhere to be found – the case goes to Hanne Wilhelmsen, recently promoted to superintendent in the Oslo police. Hanne suspects that Olav witnessed the murder and fled, and she orders an investigation of the orphanage staff.

young woman is murdered in her Oslo flat. One finger has been severed from her left hand, and behind her eyelid is secreted a tiny red diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star – a pentagram, the devil’s star. Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case with his long-time adversary Tom Waaler and initially wants no part in it. But Harry is already on notice to quit the force and is left with little alternative but to drag himself out of his alcoholic stupor and get to work. A wave of similar murders is on the horizon. An emerging pattern suggests that Oslo has a serial killer on its hands....

On the day Stockholm police officer Hanna Ahlander’s personal and professional lives crash, she takes refuge at her sister’s lodge in the Swedish ski resort paradise of Åre. But it’s a brief comfort. The entire village is shaken by the sudden vanishing of a local teenage girl. Hanna can’t help but investigate, and while searching for the missing person, she lands a job with the local police department. There she joins forces with Detective Inspector Daniel Lindskog, who has been tasked with finding the girl. Their only lead: a scarf in the snow.

Jurek Walter was shot and killed years ago. The police moved on and managed to forget the darkness that had tainted their lives. But now someone is leaving a trail of broken bodies across Sweden, and the clues all point to Walter. Detective Joona Linna is convinced his worst nightmare is becoming a reality: the man who tore apart his family has returned to finish the job. When Joona’s partner is taken - and locked inside an underground coffin - he finds himself with an impossible choice: leave her to die, or walk into the trap set by the only man he ever feared.

DI Jamie Johansson is trying to find normality in Kurrajakk when she gets the chance to sit in on the Interpol interview linked to her last case. A pattern of mutilation and beheading on the Finnish border has Jamie's full attention, but Interpol seem more interested in the Russian connection. Begrudgingly, they let her follow up, and as usual, Jamie's nose for trouble doesn't steer her wrong.

With the summer season on Sandhamn comes an unsettling mystery for Detective Inspector Thomas Andreasson. A bullied young boy has vanished from a sailing camp on neighboring Lökholmen Island. Has the terrorized eleven-year-old run away? Or, in this isolated vacation spot where strangers lurk, is it something more ominous?

When a young woman is discovered brutally murdered in her own apartment, with an intricate pattern of lines carved into her face, Copenhagen police detectives Jeppe Korner and Anette Werner are assigned to the case. They very quickly establish a link between the victim, Julie Stender, and her complex landlady, Esther de Laurenti. Esther also turns out to be a budding novelist - and when Julie turns up as a murder victim in the still-unfinished mystery she's writing, the link between fiction and real life grows more urgent.

In the Swedish ski resort of Åre, crime is rare. Certainly nothing so brutal as the murder of Johan Andersson, a former Olympic skier found bound and beaten to death in the forest. According to his distraught wife, he didn’t have any enemies in the world. To Detective Inspectors Hanna Ahlander and Daniel Lindskog, the crime proves otherwise. But what could have provoked such rage? And in whom?

An unbearably tense novel of revenge, murder, bereavement and the destructive force of passion. The single-mother families of the isolated community under the shadow of the Pyderhorn, Bergen's greatest mountain, are being terrorised by a teenage gang. But teenage violence is nothing compared to what awaits detective Varg Veum when he gets to know the blue-eyed Wenche Andersen.

The new summer house on Sandhamn Island is an architectural dream for its owner, Carsten Jonsson. It’s a nightmare for the locals. The venture capitalist has flouted local traditions, property lines, and the natural beauty of the coastline. He’s also too wealthy and arrogant to heed the anonymous warnings to leave. The threats escalate when his guest lodge is burned to the ground and an unidentifiable corpse is found in the charred ruins.

Former cop Emma Tapper and her lawyer boss Angela Köhler are defending shipping boss Anita Spendel, charged with murdering her billionaire husband. Anita insists Martin Spendel is still alive, but his car is soaked in his blood. Emma must clear Anita’s name by finding the missing man—dead or alive… Meanwhile, on a luxury yacht off the coast of Ibiza, Bianca Aguilera is relaxing in the sun when a drone delivers an unexpected parcel. The contents: chilling evidence that someone close to her is dead. Horror quickly turns to realisation.

It seemed like an open-and-shut case. But they couldn’t have been more wrong. When a 25-year-old woman is found dead in Stockholm, detective Vanessa Frank knows that there is more to the case than meets the eye. And when Vanessa finds herself on the trail of a dangerous internet community who call themselves "incels", her world starts to unravel. These ‘involuntarily celibate’ men have fostered hatred towards the women who turn them down, and now women are turning up dead.

It is 1795 and evil lurks in the winding alleys of Stockholm. Tycho Ceton prowls the city, willing to do anything to survive and reclaim the honour he has lost. No one knows what he is planning next but Emil Winge, haunted by the ghosts of his past, is determined to stop him. Meanwhile, Jean Mickel Cardell is preoccupied with his own search for Anna Stina Knapp. She may have in her possession a letter which could have devastating consequences in the wrong hands. All the while, hell looms inexorably.

Noora Nieminen was destined to become a world champion. But when the sixteen-year-old skating sensation is found slain with her own skates, her promising career is unexpectedly cut short. Detective Maria Kallio is seven months pregnant, but that isn't going to stop her from putting everything she has into solving the murder. With a promotion on the line and her arrogant adversary, Pertti Ström, vying for the new job, Maria is determined to make an arrest.

Sandhamn Island’s archipelago is a beautiful place to visit. For a mother on the run, it’s the only place to hide in a novel of escalating suspense by Viveca Sten, bestselling author of Still Waters.