Easy Money

In the searing debut of Swedish criminal defense attorney Lapidus, three lost souls converge along cocaine’s nightmare highway to hell. Fearsome Serbian Mrado, a collector/dealer/hit man for Yugo crime boss Radovan Kranjic, yearns for more visitation rights with his little daughter, Lovisa. Lower-middle-class JW, tormented by the disappearance of his sister, Camilla, uses coke to ingratiate himself with Stockholm’s moneyed flaming youth. Meanwhile, Chilean prison escapee Jorge Salinas Barrio, a walking coke encyclopedia, wants revenge on Mrado and Radovan for sending him up, but he’s also protecting his sister, Paola. Lapidus counterpoints the trio’s individual pursuits of wealth, power, and human dignity with scraps of court testimony, confidential police memos, and newspaper accounts of police offensives against organized crime. This sprawling novel, full of offensive language, exposes moral degradation of every stripe while relentlessly depicting Sweden’s underworld and the reasons it exists and grows. Author tour. (Nov.)