The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules

In Ingelman-Sundberg's winning seriocomic series debut, 79-year-old Martha Andersson gets fed up with her treatment at the Diamond House retirement home, starting with its bad food and restrictions. Martha decides to do something about her situation by enlisting a number of her geriatric friends, including 79-year-old Oscar "Brains" Krupp, in becoming "the most troublesome oldies in the world." They form the League of Pensioners and embark on a series of escapades that begins with a kitchen raid and grows progressively bolder to include a bank robbery. The OAPs (old age pensioners) prove both adept and inept in ways that are both charming and surprising as they pull off the theft of paintings by Renoir and Monet from Stockholm's National Museum, and then have to deal with the consequences. Readers will pull for the unlikely gang in their efforts to commit the "ultimate crime" toward the end of this appealing crime novel. (July)