Marilyn Stasio
With so much good crime fiction coming out of Scandinavia these days, it helps to get a solid handle on a writer—and with Kjell Eriksson, what we find is an extraordinary depth of feeling for honest people caught up in serious crime…As he did in The Princess of Burundi and The Cruel Stars of the Night, Eriksson shows how crime undermines the foundations of both family and community.
—The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Swedish author Eriksson's masterful ensemble procedural, the third available in the U.S. after The Cruel Stars of the Night(2007), immerses the reader in the ordinary and extraordinary lives of detective Ann Lindell and her colleagues of the Uppsala police force. The odd assemblage of characters who engage the interest of the police include a Mexican peasant, Manuel Alavez, who has traveled to Sweden to see his imprisoned brother; a restaurant owner, Slobodan Andersson, whose successful restaurants, Dakar and Alhambra, owe much to shady funds and his unusual partner, Armas; and a single mother, Eva Willman, for whom a waitressing job opens new vistas. After Armas is found dead of a knife wound, others get caught up in the turmoil caused by the crimes of a few. There are plenty of shades of gray in this tale told with wry humor, compassion and a fine understanding that in life often things cannot be resolved either neatly or completely. (May)
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Library Journal
In Eriksson's third novel to be published in the United States (after The Princess of Burundiand The Cruel Stars of the Night), series detective Ann Lindell must identify a corpse found in a river and figure out what lies behind the murder. Her investigation leads her to Dakar, a high-end restaurant in Uppsala, Sweden. As usual, Eriksson packs his story with numerous characters, multiple plotlines told in different voices, and an ending from which no one but the reader emerges a winner. Not a quick read, as the similarity among many of the Swedish names can be confusing, and some readers may be turned off by the author's anti-American politics. But recommended for collections where Scandinavian crime fiction circulates. [See Prepub Mystery, LJ1/08; library marketing planned.-Ed.]
—Jo Ann Vicarel
Kirkus Reviews
Murder joins the menu at a trendy Swedish restaurant. The tale introduces a handful of unrelated characters-a pair of Mexican brothers named Manuel and Patricio; culinary entrepreneur Slobodan Andersson, who boasts a long list of enemies; Johnny Kvarnheden, a melancholy chef with a romantic soul; recently divorced single mother Eva Willman, desperate for a new job after being laid off at the post office; and homeless Konrad Rosenberg-before focusing on Dakar, the Uppsala restaurant Slobodan rules with an iron hand. Eva gets a challenging job there as a waitress, and Johnny as a cook. She finds in him a reliable friend and a resource for mentoring her two volatile sons, Patrik and Hugo. In due time a body clad only in underwear washes ashore in Uppsala. Detective Ann Lindell and her team soon identify the dead man as Slobodan's partner Armas. Meanwhile, Rosenberg comes into an unexpected fortune; Manuel gets closer and closer to Uppsala with dark intent; and the police question Patrik about a series of attacks by gangs of teenagers. Might any of them be connected to the crime?In Lindell's seventh case, the third published in English (The Princess of Burundi, 2006, etc.), Eriksson's unique achievement is crafting a richly layered novel packed with sublime character detail out of which his murder puzzle seamlessly emerges.
