The Nightmare

Scandinavian sleuth Joona Linna of the National Homicide Squad has a way with odd murder cases, and in Kepler’s latest, he faces two real puzzlers. A young woman is found dead on a deserted yacht, her lungs full of water, but her body and clothes dry as a bone. The following day, a government official is discovered in his Stockholm apartment hanging from a high rafter, an apparent suicide—except there is no furniture in the room on which he could have made his fatal climb. Narrator Mark Bramhall smoothly handles tongue-twisting Nordic names, and sets a pace that allows the listener to properly process the often-perplexing events without diminishing their chilling effect. He also provides a variety of appropriate voices for a large cast that includes a surprisingly emotional antiterrorist expert, a frightened young peace activist on the run from an unstoppable assassin, and the evil mastermind behind the deaths. An FSG/Sarah Crichton hardcover. (July)