Mystery Scene Review

Never End by Ake Edwardson (W)
Viking Press, June, 2006

It's been a rewarding time for fans of crime fiction hailing from Northern Europe, and this moody, character-driven mystery is no exception. A young woman is raped in a deserted Gothenburg public park; not long after another young woman is raped and strangled to death. Both crimes have an eerie similarity and Chief Inspector Erik Winter suspects that they may also be connected to an unsolved rape/murder incident in the same park years earlier. But if the new crimes are connected, why didn't the perpetrator kill the first girl? Then, a third woman is killed and Winter and his associates uncover a possible link between the victims that takes them into the sordid underbelly of the city's nightlife and possibly deeper. Unfortunately, Winter's obsession with the case propels him into a grim psychological state that not only endangers his own life, but that of his partner, and of his family.

This is the second book in the Erik Winter series to be published in this country and it rivals the very best. The prose is sparse, punchy yet finely detailed, and the characterizations are intimate and messy with the troubling yet bountiful ring of truth. It's also a commanding page-turner that will have you racing through it till the very last sentence. Who would have thought there was so much murder and mayhem in Scandinavia? And that so much of it would be so bloody good.

- Derek Hill

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