Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End (The Story of a Crime Series) by Leif G W Persson

Paperback:  Between Summer's Longing an Winter's End (2010)  is the first novel in a trilogy that has become the defining account of the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme - an event that still haunts the collective Swedish memory.  It is acclaimed as one of the greatest Swedish crime novels of all time and is an award-winning Swedish classic.

Stockholm.  The dead of winter.  The temperature is already well below freezing.

A young American dies, falling from a tall building.  It appears to be a casual, self-inflicted death.  It should be an open-and-shut case.  But when Superintendent Lars Martin Johansson begins to delve beneath the layers of corruption, incompetence and violence that threaten to strangle the Stockholm police department, he uncovers a complex web of treachery, politics and espionage.

Johansson quickly realizes that there is nothing routine about this suicide as it soon takes him from domestic drama to the rotten heart of Sweden's government and the murder of the prime minister.

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End is a riveting insider's combination of black satire, thriller, psychological drama, and police procedural about the biggest police investigation in recorded history.

The book is translated from the Swedish by Paul Norlen.

About the author:  Leif G W Persson is the Grand Master of Scandinavian crime fiction.  Over three decades, he has taken a scalpel to the political and social mores of Swedish society in his dark, complex and satirical crime novels.  His work melds the social realism of a Balzac or a Dickens with the hard-boiled street smarts of James Ellroy.

Born in 1945, Persson has had an extraordinary career.  At once Scandinavia's most renowned criminologist and leading psychological profiler, Persson has also served as an advisor to the Swedish Ministry of Justice.  Since 1991, he has been Professor at the National Swedish Police Board and is regularly consulted by media as the country's foremost expert on crime.  He is the author of nine novels.  Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End is the first to be translated into English.  His most recent novel, The Dying Detective (2016), was awarded Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers.

Rating:  3/5