SAIL OF STONE

A pair of fresh cases for Erik Winter and Aneta Djanali, of the Gothenburg Police.

Though she hasn’t made any complaints herself, her neighbors have repeatedly indicated that Anette Lindsten has been attacked. Responding to the latest report, Aneta gets barely a glimpse of the alleged victim before she’s turned away. In the absence of a complainant, her inquiries must begin in speculation. The likeliest person to have beaten Anette is her live-in lover, legal archivist Hans Forsblad. Before building a case against Forsblad, however, Aneta’s first order of business is to get Anette out of her house. Imagine her surprise when, on a return visit, she finds Anette’s father and brother packing up her things—and then her even greater surprise when she learns that Anette has no brother and that the solicitous men were a pair of thieves. Winter, meanwhile, is chasing his own will-o’-the-wisp at the urging of his old girlfriend Johanna Osvald, who’s worried because her fisherman father Axel has vanished during a trip to Scotland. It soon becomes clear that Axel was investigating the disappearance of his own father, John Osvald, from a fishing trawler during the war. “Yet another generation of Osvalds takes off to look for the last one,” muses Winter (The Shadow Woman, 2010, etc.). But that’s the only thing that’s clear about a case that will take Winter himself to Scotland in quest of sightings of either Johanna’s father or her grandfather. The detection in both cases is as inexorable and tedious as water chipping away stone. Recommended for readers with a taste for cold climates and a lot of time on their hands.