The Dead of Summer

Starred review from December 9, 2013
Add Jungstedt to the list of Scandinavian crime writers proficient at creating a dark mood for a complex whodunit featuring characters with genuine depth. In her fifth featuring Visby Det. Supt. Anders Knutas (after 2010’s The Killer’s Art), Karin Jacobsson, his newly promoted deputy, starts a complex inquiry into a murder committed while Knutas is on holiday. Peter Bovide, the owner of a small construction company, has been camping on the island of Faro with his wife and children. One morning, Bovide fails to return from his regular morning jog, and his bullet-ridden body, including multiple stomach shots after one to the head, turns up shortly afterward. The overkill suggests a personal motive for the killing, but none is easily detectible. Jungstedt has a talent for turning a phrase—the widow’s despair over her loss is so strong that “it actually made the air hard to breathe.” The twists perfectly combine surprise and logic.

February 15, 2014
In her fifth Anders Knutas procedural (following Killer's Art, 2013), Jungstedt once again explores life on the remote islands of Sweden's Gotland province. Due to an all-too-rare vacation for the superintendent, Deputy Detective Karin Jacobsson is in charge when construction manager Peter Bovide is murdered at a seaside campsite. The victim is a faithful husband and father of two young children, and there's nothing on the surface to explain why someone would want to fire a round of bullets into his abdomen. Could he have gotten on the wrong side of the undocumented workers he'd been hiring from the Baltics? Jacobsson ably organizes her colleagues on the police force, while trying to constrain recurring character journalist Johan Berg. Short chapters chronicling the investigation are interspersed with the parallel story of German sisters who, as teenagers, visited Sweden's remote Gotska Sandn Island in 1985. Sadly, only one sister left the island alive. Another solid addition to the growing canon of Swedish crime drama, in the grand tradition of Maj Sjwall and Per Wahl.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)