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THE SAINT by Carin Gerhardsen and Paul Norlén Mysterious Press, November 2024 336 pages $17.95 ISBN: 1613165552

Crime fiction has a great deal of variety, with readers able to choose among police procedurals, hitman stories, gruesome serial killer thrillers, and conspiracy-driven plots. In THE SAINT, Swedish author Carin Gerhardsen offers them all in a single package.

The book begins as a classic procedural, with a team of a half dozen police officers working as a team to solve a murder. A man with a sterling reputation has been shot dead in the forest, with the only clue an incomplete poker hand tucked in his pocket, along with a blurry series of ink-smudged figures. Given that the man was an upstanding family man who coached children's soccer teams and took food to homeless people, nobody can imagine who would want him dead. Since he had just left a poker game the night of the murder, they first begin by questioning the men he played with, all of whom have something in their past that makes them at least somewhat suspicious.

As is customary, there are relationships among the police to unpack and instances where their personal lives take the foreground. One officer in particular, a new member of the team, is a puzzle to Chief Inspector Conny Sjöberg, the leader of the squad. Yet she is the one who brings a sharp intellect to bear on several of the challenges they face.

After chasing down clues for all of the poker players, their case is suddenly blown open when it seems an unexpected perpetrator is likely the guilty party. It's only after leads are chased down and an arrest is made that the team can relax - at least until they realize their initial investigation uncovered tantalizing clues to a series of crimes that had never been solved, or in some cases never investigated, shifting the genre gears again into gruesome serial killer territory. Finally, there's some evidence of a conspiracy involving rape brought to light in the final pages, a plot line apparently introduced in previous entries in the series.

There are a lot of characters to keep track of (with a list provided to help), a plot that offers quite a few clever twists, and a pace that starts out slow and gains speed as the genre changes are rung. The translation is serviceable but seems more literal than graceful. This novel, the fourth in the Hammarby series, was originally published in 2011 and is the first to be published in English by Mysterious Press, though a scattering of others are available in English translation from other publishers. While it will be of interest to Scandi Noir fans, particularly those who enjoy sensational plots more than sociological exploration, it doesn't really offer anything new.

§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.

Reviewed by Barbara Fister, November 2024

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