THE DISAPPEARED

The third case for Sweden’s Criminal Investigation Department (Silenced, 2013, etc.) presents a riveting series of crimes whose investigators are deeply embroiled in them.

Two years after she went missing, Rebecca Trolle, or at least most of her, has finally turned up in a pair of plastic bags buried in a shallow grave. The discovery of her remains immediately sets off all sorts of alarm bells. Why were photos of her as “Miss Miracle” posted on a porn site two months after her death? How much progress had she made on her unlikely dissertation topic, an attempt to prove children’s author Thea Aldrin innocent of the murder of her husband 30 years ago, a murder for which Thea already served a prison sentence? Did Thea really write Memory and Asteroid, the violent sexual fantasies whose 1976 publications made her both a best-selling novelist and a pariah? Who’s been sending Thea—long a resident in the Mångården care home and mute since 1981—flowers every week with the terse note “Thanks”? Which member of her intimate film club—financier Morgan Axberger, solicitor Elias Hjort or literature professor Spencer Lagergren—shot the footage showing a young woman being hacked to death? And how are these questions connected to the recent sexual allegations Lagergren’s student Tova Eriksson has lodged against him or to his hope of a peaceful life with his lover, police consultant Fredrika Bergman, and their baby daughter? Ohlsson frames this painful case—“a drama that was still claiming its victims 30 years on”—with a series of police interrogations of Fredrika and DI Peder Rydh that ramp up the anxiety even further.

A gripping tale not for the squeamish, the shy or the nervous.