Wednesday 10 May 2017

#BookReview: The Arsonist (Mordbrännaren) by Johan Kant and Anders Gustafson

Mordbrännaren by Anders Gustafson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A violent fire destroys caravans and tents at Singö camping, where a group of Romani lives. Criminal Investigator Solbritt Andersson, who is loaned from Stockholm to Norrtälje Police Station, and her colleague Lena Karlsson leads the investigation. The perpetrators have not left any traces on the site, except that they have sprayed a brown triangle on a wall. Soon there is also a farm on the northern Singö in flames. Is there a connection between the fires?

In parallel with the complex fire investigations, the police are continuing to map the network around the spy and ex-military Sven Löwengrip. The past once again throws long shadows over the archipelago.

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Reading the three published books in the Singö series back to back has been great. It actually feels like reading one book that has been split into three since the storyline around Sven Löwengrip is continuing in this book. I found this book to be just as good as the first book in the series.

Some time has passed since the storyline in The Singö Spy, and Solbritt is now working with Lena Karlsson who she worked with in the first book after Solbritt cut her vacation short when the digging into the Singö murder that occurred thirty years previous turned out to have connections to the present time. Now there seems to be an arsonist loose Singö, but are the two fires really connected, or is possible that someone else would have a motive to burn down the farm? This case will get very personal to Solbritt when someone close to her is suspected being behind the fire that burned down the farm.

The police may have had some breakthrough with the old Singö murder that occurred the day after Prime Minister Olof Palme was murdered, but it's far from completely solved. The spy and murderer Sven Löwengrip is still not found and it seems that the contraband group that the police destroyed is just a tiny part of a larger criminal imperium.

The Arsonist is a good sequel, here we finally get answers to questions from the first book, even though not everything is solved. That's what I really enjoy about this series. That not everything is solved at the end of the books. But, at the same time, every book feel like a closed chapter. That Solbritt and her colleagues are slowly getting closer to the mastermind behind it all.

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