Viveca Sten

I listened to the audiobook of this novel.

On the Swedish island of Sandhamm, three bodies have been discovered. It is unclear how or if these deaths occurred naturally, by accident, or by intent. Police detective Tomas is sent to the island to investigate the deaths. His best friend, Nora, a lawyer, lives on Sandhamm in the summer with her family; she becomes involved in the investigation.

The book was good, with actions well-explained, and so the plot was easy to follow. What I didn't like was the ending. One of my least-liked literary tropes was used to solve the case - a confession in a letter.

This book is a first novel, so I will be generous and not pointing out plot holes. I'm going to read more works by this author as I see potential, as did her publisher. I do love a Scandinavian crime novel, and I look forward to reading more.… (more)

A young mother is on her way to a Swedish ski resort near the Norwegian border when her young son has to pee. It is -12 degrees Celsius (10 degrees Fahrenheit). She pulls the car over and lets him out. A short time later he comes back and tells his mother there is a man lying on the ground. She gets out to investigate and finds a man lying in the snow, his hands bound behind him and his head bashed in. He is covered with snow.
This is the beginning of Hidden in Shadows. Detective Daniel Lindskog along with his temporary partner Hanna Alhander, both of whom we met in Hidden in Snow, investigate. The victim turns out to be Johan Anderssen, a former Olympic skier who met with injury and now runs a plumbing company with his partner. By all accounts, Johan was a cheerful man with a positive outlook on life so it is hard to understand why he was so brutally murdered.
After speaking to Anderssen’s wife, Marion, and his business partner, Linus Sundin, the investigation begins to focus on Sundin. He is an alcoholic, has financial issues and has been known to be violent. Upon Anderssen’s death, he inherits another 25% of their company, making him majority shareowner. The financial motive is strong.
However, as you and I know, that makes it too easy. Additionally, he appears to have an alibi. As the investigation continues, more suspects arise.
A secondary story revolves around Rebecka Ekvall whose family are members of the Light of Life church and who at the young age of 19 is betrothed to the engaging, heir apparent pastor, Ole Nordhammer. He is what every girl in the church dreams of marrying. However, the church’s view of women leaves something to be desired.
The manner in which Sten weaves the two stories together is perfect. Hanna, who previously worked in the domestic violence unit of the Stockholm police, is concerned about Rebecka’s safety once she enters the picture.
Hidden in Shadows is not just an excellent police procedural. Sten touches on many topics including cults and the treatment of women, spousal abuse, the stresses of a new baby especially when one parent, Daniel, is rarely home, homosexuality and family life in general.
Hidden in Shadows follows two time periods: February 2022 follows the daily police procedures as they investigate the murder and September 2012 through 2022 in which Rebecka marries Ole and how their marriage progresses, until the two stories merge into one. Detectives from Hidden in Snow reappear, bringing the police family back together.
One review stated Hidden in Shadows “…is a pulse-pounding, character-driven follow-up to 2020’s Hidden in Snow that once again sees the powder near idyllic Swedish ski resort Are stained red with blood.”
As I stated in Hidden in Snow, Hidden in Shadows has no happy ending. The case is solved but the impact will leave lasting scars. This is, again, one of the bleakest Scandinavian noir I’ve read. However, it is well worth the read for the suspense as well as the look into the lives of both Hanna and Daniel.… (more)

This story set in Sweden was originally written and published there and translated into English. I did assume from the constant Americanisms such as references to 'mom' etc that the translator was American but at the end of the book a note reveals that they live in the UK so that is odd.

The setting is the small skiing resort of Are and its neighbouring communities, and the description of the setting plus lifestyle - nearly everyone has snowmobiles for example - was quite interesting. However, I found the characters mostly irritating. Hanna, the lead female character, is a police officer who spoke out against a coverup of a murder by a fellow officer back in Stockholm. Her nasty boss gives her an ultimatum to move to another branch of the police force or be sacked, and she goes home to a second ultimatum - her boyfriend reveals his affair with another woman and she must move out of his flat.

Fortunately for Hanna, her wealthy and successful older sister Lydia has a luxury second home in Are and allows her to live there. Hanna spends the first part of the book in meltdown/self-pity mode (apart from some drastic action with her boyfriend's belongings as the reader learns later).

A young girl goes missing and Hanna drags herself out of her pit of misery to join in the search. Gradually she becomes interested and offers information to the police, gleaned from the sister of one of the policemen who doesn't want to pass on the information herself. As they are chronically understaffed with several vacancies, she eventually is offered a job. But for a while it looks as if she has self-sabotaged that option when she hears that her boyfriend has engaged a lawyer to sue her, making it highly likely she will lose the job.

Fortunately, sister Lydia is a fairy godmother, sorting out all Hanna's problems, which are often self-inflicted. It's handy that she's a top lawyer. She neatly resolves the problem with the ex-boyfriend off stage which I found rather unsatisfying. Why bother with that whole subplot if it is resolved with no real consequences?

The rest of the more developed characters are also deeply flawed. Without wishing to create spoilers, both parents who lose a child go into total meltdown and completely fail their remaining children. The man in charge of the local police department is constantly beating himself up because of failing to be home on time to look after his baby daughter and take some of the load off his partner, but this is the first time there has ever been a murder in the area and in theory the long hours would only be for a limited period, assuming the crime is solved. It's not as if she didn't know he was a policeman when she became involved with him.

One thing which should be flagged as a content warning for those who don't like reading about cruelty to animals, the story involves the death of a pet animal.

Altogether I found it a frustrating read. Hanna does gradually pull herself together and show herself a capable officer but she then self-sabotages that again by going off on a tangent without even calling in where she's going. And it gets tiring to have so many characters who are wallowing in self-pity etc. So I can only rate this as an OK 2 stars.… (more)

The Publisher Says: A woman’s dangerous career comes to a chilling end in this spellbinding thriller by Viveca Sten, bestselling author of In the Heat of the Moment…

The body of world-famous journalist Jeanette Thiels is discovered the day after Christmas, frozen in a snow-spotted garden just steps from her hotel on Sandhamn Island. Detective Thomas Andreasson finds it highly unlikely that it was some bizarre accident. After all, the relentless war-zone correspondent was no stranger to conflict and controversy—both professional, and of late, very personal. Who would want to see her dead is another story.

Enlisting the help of attorney Nora Linde, his longtime friend on holiday, Thomas is anxious for the answers. But he and Nora don’t have to look far. The clues are leading them closer to home than they imagined. Jeannette may have made a career out of exposing corruption at the highest levels of world power, but she was also a woman with secrets of her own and they’re coming to light on Sandhamn. But for Thomas and Nora, unearthing the deeply rooted deceptions behind Jeanette’s death could now put those closest to her in harm’s way, too.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review,/b>: I now know more than I ever knew there was to know about pickled herring.

This is not an approving statement.

Again, we're police-proceduraling with Thomas and Margit. She's coalesced into more of a presence than I ever expected her to do, has our Margit; but I'm still not distracted from the mains by her involvement in investigations so I call the author's level of detail in limning her character good. The immigration issues facing Europe, the backlash from "cultural purity" proponents, the unbelievable, incredible hatred that some are consumed by for those not just like them all concatenate at the same time as Nora's Yule festivities on Sandhamn. (Why she includes the vile ex-husband is beyond me.)

After Iranian immigrant journalist Juliette dies in the snow outside her hotel on the island (you know, I love cozies and their settings, but the logical part of me says "the Swedes ain't idiots and this place would glow like Chernobyl on any statistical map of Swedish crime" like Midsomer would in England); it's not a horrible accident, of course. Juliette's work is digging into some unnerving and clearly unsavory stuff that the Powers That Be did not want exposed. Then Juliette's controlling Swedish ex-husband comes into the suspect frame; even his pre-adolescent daughter thinks he probably had some hand in her mother's death.

Enter Thomas and Margit as the lead investigators, and the police Scoobygroup we've seen before starts the interesting ferreting among the fallen leaves of this dogged, but hapless, woman's life. The work she'd been doing about the burgeoning nativist group that hates non-Nordic Swedes was reaching a critical mass and that's a reason to kill in that sick, twisted worldview. The issues between her and her ex keep the focus on the police's work in solving her poisoning; thus off the Nora parts of the plot. For those hooked in by Nora from the off, this story will feel frustrating. Her involvement in Thomas's case is pretty much nil; her plot strands are lawyering related, as her company is enmeshed in the colonial remnants of Sweden's centuries-old Baltic empire. This leads to some unpleasant, though legal, ways of making money, to Nora's deep disgust; her firm's head and she are due for a showdown over this shady, unethical entanglement (among other things, like misogyny and borderline harassment). As this echoes the main case's focus on the role of History in forming a place for better or ill, it wasn't a waste to include Nora. She doesn't play a role in the crime investigation but her moral musings and decisions do offer depth of field to the main idea behind the murder.

I am not a fan of the dithering "will-she-won't-she" style of storytelling I see all too much of in series reads. Why women should be presented as so weak as to constantly question their decisions about men is something I do not think we question as a trope nearly hard enough. Nora's ex shouldn't be up for rehabilitation after his emotional abuse of her. (Let's not even bring up The Slap. Might bring up my lunch wth it.) She's decided several books ago that the affair she discovered him having is the bridge too far. That should be allowed to be that. Her efforts not to estrange her ex-husband from their sons is admirable. But let's leave it as focused on the EX part and not so much the HUSBAND part.

That ongoing snark aside, the role of ethnicity in this story is very much the catalyst for some trademark idiotic behaviors among the investigators. Thomas in particular is, every book, doing something that unnecessarily endangers his life...and while I'm really not on board with his reunion with Pernilla, he DOES have an infant daughter to consider before haring off without backup to Get The Perp. And this time he's very much not alone, since one of the investigative Scoobygroup is an Iranian-born Swede whose dander gets up as facts of the case come to light. He decides, like his colleagues Thomas and Margit, to say "screw it" to rule-following and puts himself (and, one would think, any hope of bringing a successful prosecution) in danger.

Well, fiction ain't fact, and at least in the latter case I really got why the response was what it was.

I do want to offer one very major content warning: There is, in this entry, animal abuse that I found very upsetting. It is the reason that I rated this read lower than the one before it, when before this occurred, I was set to give it a solid four stars. I am, it's true, very averse to this subject matter, and others might not find the event portrayed as upsetting as I did. For my fellows in feeling that children and animals being harmed are not welcome events in my entertainment, be aware this occurs.

Snowy, Yule-y streets in the sweetly intimate island community of Sandhamn. The expected death. The inevitable successful resolution of the crime. The ongoing lives of characters I've come to care about. All the elements of damned fine read. And so it was.

Until the content warning stuff happened. I'll be continuing with the series but some luster got lost off my pleasure.… (more)