Edwardson's middling fourth police procedural to be made available in the U.S. (after 2007's Frozen Tracks
) lacks the sophisticated plot and characters that mark the work of such other Swedish crime authors as Helene Tursten and Stieg Larsson. Chief Insp. Erik Winter joins forces with his British counterparts after a series of brutal murders of young men in London and his own city of Gothenburg. The killer, dubbed Hitchcock, appears to have filmed the butchery, as evidenced by traces of a tripod stand in the victims' blood. The trail naturally leads into the seamy world of snuff films, but the big break comes from a burglar who noticed some blood-stained clothing in an apartment he broke into. The smooth translation is perhaps the book's best feature. Edwardson has won the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' Award three times. (Sept. 29)
