The Shadow Woman
A Chief Inspector Erik Winter Novel
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4.0 • 21 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The second installment of the internationally best selling Erik Winter series
It's August and the annual Gothenburg Party is in full swing. But this year the bacchanalian blowout is simmering with ethnic discord spurred by nativist gangs. When a woman is found murdered in the park-her identity as inscrutable as the blood-red symbol on the tree above her body-Winter's search for her missing child leads him from sleek McMansions to the Gothenburg fringes, where "northern suburbs" is code for "outsider" and the past is inescapable-even for Sweden's youngest chief inspector. Psychologically gripping and socially astute, The Shadow Woman puts this master of Swedish noir on track to build an American audience on par with his international fame.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Near the start of Edwardson's solid fifth novel featuring Insp. Erik Winter to be made available in the U.S. (after 2009's Death Angels), a fellow homicide detective of foreign background, Aneta Djanali, gets her jaw smashed when she intervenes in an assault during an annual summer party held outdoors in Gothenburg. Winter cuts short his vacation to investigate. Soon after, a woman turns up dead at the edge of a forest, possibly strangled, with no identifying papers on her body. The chase leads Winter from the unusually hot streets of Gothenburg to seaside towns in Denmark, from the biker wars heating up in Scandinavia to those that raged decades earlier when the Hell's Angels and Bandidos first arrived in northern Europe. This thoroughly satisfying police procedural offers forays into the murky waters of immigration and assimilation as well as the obsessive mind of the sleuth.
Customer Reviews
Puzzle-Box
Great opening, just like Death Angels, where we experience from the viewpoint of the character and not an omniscient narrator. It creates the groundwork for the mystery, and adds to the confusion and suspense. And, even in that establishing scene, things are not what they seem, and, with identity swapping, timeline-jumping, I was kept wondering until the end. It's great that the mystery was built up in the writing structure itself.
Winter is a changed man, after the last case. And has trouble getting re-adjusted, but he's reconnecting with family, and on the verge of an important personal decision. Edwardson is able to make these personal details follow and inform the emotional and plot arcs, instead of detracting from them. For those who don't like much in the way of the personal lives of the detective, you won't feel bogged down at all.
Also repeating from the first book (I read them in the order they were written, not published in English) is a sense of wistfulness, tragedy, and sadness that reflects the compartmentalization and struggles when cops are faced daily with the dark side of it all. Recommended as much as the first, DEATH ANGELS