Never Coming Back

Blockbuster-ready pacing combines with a psychological manual’s clinical tone to make Koppel’s thriller, a bestseller in his native Sweden, almost too chilling for its own good. When Ylva Zetterberg fails to come home one evening, her husband Mike’s painful memory of her infidelity causes him to initially assume that she’s abandoned him and their seven-year-old daughter. As the period of Ylva’s absence lengthens, he starts to correctly suspect she’s been kidnapped, even as police and community scrutiny falls on him. Unknown to Mike, Ylva is across the street, kept in a soundproofed basement by a husband and wife who taunt her with a video feed of her own house’s exterior. Ylva’s only hope rests on two old schoolmates’ realization of the long-festering vendetta being played out. Previously a children’s author under his real name, Petter Lidbeck, Koppel bluntly and expertly mines very adult themes of male sexual insecurity and female victimization to page-turning but off-putting effect. (Dec.)