Summer Death

A steaming hot Swedish summer provides the backdrop for Kallentoft’s gritty second thriller featuring Linköping Det. Insp. Malin Fors (after 2012’s Midwinter Blood). While swimming at her health club, Malin receives a call from a colleague to come to a crime scene at the city’s Horticultural Society Park, where a naked blond girl in her early teens has been found. Evidently a rape victim, the girl has no memory of what happened to her. When a psychopath later kills another girl, also in her early teens, Malin, who likens herself to Batman (“Damaged goods, yet trying to watch over something”), strives all the more to engage with those who suffer from these terrible crimes. Meanwhile, the detective is sick with worry for her 14-year-old daughter, Tove, and still grieves over the love she and her former husband, Janne, tossed away. As she rants against “bloody mediatocracy... the rapturous elevation of the mediocre,” Malin struggles to preserve her integrity in this utterly convincing indictment of today’s soul-consuming celebrity culture. (June)