cover image The Shadow Woman: An Inspector Erik Winter Novel

The Shadow Woman: An Inspector Erik Winter Novel

Åke Edwardson, trans. from the Swedish by Per Carlsson, Penguin, $15 paper (352p) ISBN 978-0-14-311794-0

Near the start of Edwardson's solid fifth novel featuring Insp. Erik Winter to be made available in the U.S. (after 2009's Death Angels), a fellow homicide detective of foreign background, Aneta Djanali, gets her jaw smashed when she intervenes in an assault during an annual summer party held outdoors in Gothenburg. Winter cuts short his vacation to investigate. Soon after, a woman turns up dead at the edge of a forest, possibly strangled, with no identifying papers on her body. The chase leads Winter from the unusually hot streets of Gothenburg to seaside towns in Denmark, from the biker wars heating up in Scandinavia to those that raged decades earlier when the Hell's Angels and Bandidos first arrived in northern Europe. This thoroughly satisfying police procedural offers forays into the murky waters of immigration and assimilation as well as the obsessive mind of the sleuth. (Oct.)